


Hypothermia

by Zoadgo



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Azgeda, Canon Divergent, F/M, Slow Burn, Systematic child abuse, discussions of child abuse
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-30
Updated: 2018-05-19
Packaged: 2018-05-30 00:46:53
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 59,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6401065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoadgo/pseuds/Zoadgo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Hypothermia; immediately before giving into freezing entirely, when cold becomes warm, when neither death nor ice are real.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>Clarke is nothing more than a power piece to Roan, a bargaining chip he uses in order to exert his new rule over his people. She doesn't hate him for it, even understands why he took her away from her people and back to the Azgeda capital, but that doesn't mean she enjoys the situation. Of course, living among people and in close quarters to their king, it's not an easy task to remain apart from them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> This is an in progress fic, so keep an eye on tags and ratings as they may change as the fic progresses. Any major warnings will be put at the start of the relevant chapter (not that I think there will be any, but hey, _Help Me_ was going to have a happy ending for the first three chapters)

The chill air bites at every inch of Clarke not securely tucked under a ridiculous pile of furs, seeming to take particular issue with her nose. She buries her face in what had once been a bear, but the cold has already done its job. Even as Clarke attempts to get comfortable enough to fall asleep again, she knows it’s a futile struggle. Although her furs are decadently warm and her room is very definitely not, she sits up with a groan and allows the pre-dawn air to rip away every vestige of warmth she’d gained in the night as she rises from her bed.

Clarke wraps a thick robe around herself before stumbling around and trying to find a candle to light. In this indeterminate time between night and day, the dark is as all-encompassing as the cold, and Clarke would like to fight off one of them at least a small amount. With enough fumbling that Clarke’s convinced she must have woken half the world, a spark catches on wick, and the darkness recedes slightly.

Methodically, Clarke lights all the candles in her room. She debates lighting the fireplace for a moment, but she doesn’t plan on being in her quarters long enough to justify the effort. The growing light in the room reveals what Clarke has been told are luxurious accommodations. Large windows facing out onto what is currently a field of shadows, furs and hunting trophies adorning every surface they can, bone sculptures atop a desk. Clarke turns her back on all her furnishings, favouring the windows and their shrouded view.

It’s colder by the windows, their glass doing little to prevent the temperature within from dropping, but Clarke prefers the reality of the cold to the false warmth of her bed. Everything about her reality seems to be cold these days, and it’s easier to deal with it when she steels herself to that and accepts it. Long gone are the days where Clarke could act in the warmth of passion, now every move she makes has to be like a blade of ice. As the greying sky begins to reveal the frost turning the world in front of her into a pale specter of itself, Clarke can even pick out the moment that it happened. 

It was during the negotiation for peace with Roan, or more specifically when Clarke was trying to persuade him towards matricide. If Roan was to accept her proposal and kill his mother to usurp her throne, he needed a guarantee. First, that Clarke would convince Lexa to lift his banishment. When she protested she might not be able to do so, Roan simply insisted he wasn’t blind and left it at that. It had been as easy as he’d implied it would be, much as Clarke hates to admit that he was right.

The second promise he required was the power to keep the throne once he took it, more than that given to him by his status of Prince of Azgeda. Roan needed the power of Wanheda, and Clarke accepted on the spot. For her people, for peace between the now-thirteen clans of the coalition, Clarke would die. She wasn’t happy about it when she said yes, obviously she didn’t want to die, but she was willing to allow Roan to take her life and whatever power his people thought came with it. Clarke had already given her life to her people, she was prepared to give her death for them too.

Roan, however, had other ideas.

He didn’t want Wanheda’s death, as simple as it may have made taking power for him. Roan had seen Clarke in action, had fought with her, and he didn’t believe she had the mythical power that so many sought to take from her. Of course, not many had seen Wanheda’s mercy, her failure to kill on multiple occasions. Only Clarke and Roan knew that her power was a hyperbole, and that worked very well with what Roan had planned.

Instead of Wanheda’s death, he would take her life. Clarke would come with him when he returned to Azgeda lands, the powerful Commander of Death riding at the side of the new King, giving her support to everything he decided. She would live in the frozen lands to the north, nothing more than a speaking trophy for Roan to trot out whenever he needed. Of course, he denied any such thing, insisting that she would be a valuable advisor in his court and vitally important to Azgeda and the Coalition, but Clarke knows the truth behind silk shrouding.

The sun doesn’t seem to truly rise at any point as Clarke broods upon the past, hasn’t done so for days now. Instead, the heavy grey of the sky lightens to the point where the capital of the Azgeda is revealed before Clarke. Otta, a city of fires and furs futilely attempting to fight back the ever-present cold. Roan had waxed eloquent on the subject on their ride back to it, painting it as superior to Polis in everything, his love for the place evident even when speaking to a completely unreceptive audience such as Clarke. The expression on his face upon seeing it was just as unashamedly adoring, although he quickly schooled it into something more befitting royalty. There was no question about Roan’s love for his people and his land.

Clarke has yet to feel any such emotion for the place, and she turns from the view in front of her decisively. She doesn’t particularly want to love Otta, but it would be nice to at least like it since it’s going to be her willing prison for as long as Roan sees fit. In her first days here, she had made trips into the city with Roan as he spoke to the people there, settling into his role of King quite nicely. Nothing she had seen in the crowds and back alleys had endeared the place to her.

Clarke dresses in carefully planned layers of fur, the order of application a skill she learned quickly out of necessity, as the images of those first days return to her. Everywhere she looked, the adults were strong a fierce, intimidating with their bone jewelry, scars, and accents of blood red on their clothing. They were certainly a sign of a strong people and seemed to flourish even in the harsh conditions of what Clarke has been told is fall for the Azgeda. Had they been all she’d seen, Clarke might have been able to accept Otta more than she does.

But adults are only one part of a people, and Clarke looked for the others. There had to be people beyond the fierce warrior class that seemed to make up the population. She looked for the elderly, the infirm, and the young among the crowds, but failed to see any at first. No one appeared to be older than fifty at the most, or younger than their late teens. To this day, weeks after Roan’s last public speech in which he needed Wanheda with him, Clarke still hasn’t seen anyone ill or old. It’s not a difficult assumption to deduce what a strong, warrior people might do to those who could no longer fight, and Clarke decided that she did not want to ask. She can live just fine without that theory being confirmed or denied for her.

Clarke did, however, find the children. She saw them huddled behind shelters, whisking out of sight as people came too near. No one acknowledged them, Clarke never witnessed a mother pick up her kid or a father carry them around on his shoulders. She never even saw anyone talk to the young Azgeda, even to shoo them out of the way. The children wouldn’t look at her, and Clarke didn’t really want to look at whatever was going on with them, but it was a cultural puzzle she had to solve.

And then, one day, it was solved for her as she watched a child grab a piece of roasting meat while the merchant's back was turned. She’d seen the young ones stealing before, but she hadn’t had the heart to say anything. All of them looked so miserable, Clarke would be damned if she was going to be the one to bring further misfortune upon them. So Clarke turned the other way as the child made to run off with their meal, but unfortunately another passerby was not so kind.

Clarke learned that day, as she watched a child beaten in the street for stealing a small scrap of meat, how the Azgeda became so strong. The weak couldn’t survive in their culture, and that must be drilled into them from childhood. Clarke had confronted Roan, demanded in harsh whispers that he stop the punishment, and he’d simply shrugged.

_“It is our way, Wanheda. To spare a child would be to kill our culture.”_

She had been willing, in that moment, to throw away everything she’d agreed upon with Roan in order to stop the child from being beaten. But Roan had narrowed his eyes at her, perhaps reading the intent in her expression or knowing her too well for Clarke’s liking already, and he had ordered their guards to come closer. A wall of Azgeda separated Clarke from the child, and she had to admit she’d lost that battle.

As Clarke finishes fastening a cloak around her shoulders, she leaves her quarters and heads into Otta to do her best in winning the war. On her way out of the castle, Clarke stops by the kitchen as she does every morning. By now, the cooks and their helpers don’t even question her. The first time she had come, she had arrived as Wanheda and threatened them until they gave her an abundance of food, more than she could have possibly eaten by herself in a day. She had expected questions, but apparently power buys silence in the Azgeda.

Clarke secures her hood over her hair and slings the pack of food across her shoulders, the familiar weight of meat pies and baked root vegetables settling as awkwardly as ever. She doesn’t say thank you, doesn’t nod to the cooks who she knows are likely put at risk by her actions. It is not their way, as Clarke has been told time and time again.

There is no wall with guards positioned on it around the castle, as Clarke had seen in history books. However, Clarke knows there are guards stationed outside, both obvious ones walking the grounds and more clever ones hidden in alcoves and shadows, and her heart had been in her throat the first time she’d tried to sneak past their patrols. But now Clarke walks out of the kitchens onto the back field of the castle, frosted grass crunching underfoot, and heads around the building with confidence. The guards are there to keep people out, not in. What would seem to be a humble trader with a pack on their back going to the market in Otta is allowed to pass without note.

The layer of ice on the ground seems thicker today, Clarke’s footing a little more precarious, and she knows that the warnings Roan has been giving her about “true winter” are at least partially true. She hopes he’s exaggerating how high the snow gets, but given the current state of things and that no one else is complaining of the cold yet, Clarke wonders if he’ll be proven true once the clouds finally decide to break.

The path to Otta is blessedly short, and the constant travel of people within the city proper seems to have banished the threat of winter, at least for now. Within the twisting streets, there’s no frost and the slight wind is cut by the bulk of buildings. Clarke wouldn’t call it warm in the city, but it’s certainly less cold than her isolated early morning trek down to it. She slips into the growing bustle as merchants open stalls, children begin slipping through gaps to try and steal their living for the day, and the capital city of the Azgeda wakes to fight off the cold as they do every day.

A few familiar turns past wood and fur huts takes Clarke away from the main roads and the market, the presence of towering warriors growing thinner and that of children growing stronger. The further from the market she goes, the less children disappear as she approaches. These children have formed gangs to ensure their survival, groups of fighters that Clarke is beginning to grow quite familiar with. They aren’t scared away by a few adults, and they certainly aren’t intimidated by Clarke, Wanheda or not.

As the pathways grow more crowded, the children start to gather behind Clarke, closing her in. The first time it had happened, she’d been a little frightened if she was being quite honest, not that she’d shown it. Sure, all of the children were between the age of six and thirteen, but there were an awful lot of them and they’d been taught their whole short lives that violence is the answer to just about everything.

But now Clarke simply continues walking, ignoring the intimidation tactic. She knows her destination and the children know well enough that it’s in their best interest to let her get there. The buildings grow less and less well constructed and more packed together as Clarke grows closer to the edges of Otta, most of the city walled off by the shacks that huddle together attempting to gain some vestige of warmth. It’s impossible to reach the area Clarke’s trying to get to from the outside, even though it lies just a few feet from the fields surrounding Otta.

When she arrives at the right shack, even though Clarke knows the fields lie just beyond it, there’s nothing to indicate that other than the fact that it’s colder. Clarke doesn’t push aside the tattered fur hanging in the doorway, her destination is actually the small clearing in front of the building. The child gang made it very clear that whatever was in the shack was not for adults, and Clarke didn’t try to push her luck.

When Clarke stops in front of the run down house, there’s a small crowd of children waiting behind one girl who plays with a crude knife made of bone. She doesn’t smile at Clarke as she approaches, and Clarke doesn’t try for anything friendly. She simply nods at the girl and waits for her to speak.

“You’re late.” The girl’s high voice carries more judgment than Clarke cares for, and she raises her chin in response. She will not be intimidated by a child, no matter how much the weapon that child plays idly with looks like it’s made from a human femur.

“I’m here, Tabbi. Do you want your food or not?” Clarke meets Tabbi’s gaze and refuses to look away, staring down the young gang leader. The children behind Tabbi shifts impatiently as they do every morning when this scene plays out. And, as always, it ends with Tabbi nodding and sheathing her bone knife before Clarke drops the pack from her shoulder and starts handing out the food held within it.

The children are a blur to Clarke, each one of them trying to take more than she can afford to give them. Tabbi is the only one who gets to pick what she gets from the food, because Clarke needs to maintain a favourable relationship with her. It’s an odd relationship that they have, Tabbi allowing Clarke to feed her gang as if she’s doing Clarke a favour, but it helps Clarke sleep at night knowing that there are at least a few kids who likely won’t be beaten for being caught stealing that day.

Clarke passes out the food once Tabbi has taken her choice, giving exactly enough to each pair of hungry hands that reaches out to her. When hands try to snatch some before their turn, she swats them away and the offending child is put to the back of the line to be last to get their meal. That was their agreement. Clarke would feed them, but only if the gang would agree to not steal food from her or from anyone else. The first day was a disaster, as were many of the following ones. But now, hardly anyone needs to be shifted in their position in line. The routine has become just that, and no one fights it.

It’s because the process is so familiar to Clarke that she notices something wrong quite soon after she starts handing out the food. The crowd of children is thinner today, and Tabbi disappeared into the shack with her food rather than lording it over the other children as she normally does. Clarke tries to look around for a reason for this without seeming to be nervous, but she can’t think of any way to look behind her without revealing potential weakness to the children. So she listens and hopes that simply the cold is the reason, knowing in her gut that these children are tougher than frost and wouldn’t likely pass up a free meal for anything.

Clarke hears the footsteps in the moment before the children around her scatter, disappearing behind walls and clambering up wooden supports to scamper off to places only known to them. She knows the footsteps are too heavy to belong to any of the children, even the oldest gang members, and everything in her screams to run. But there was a reason that this clearing was the only place Tabbi would let Clarke deal with her gang, that reason being that there’s only one way into it unless you’re as light as a three-quarters starved child. There was no way for Clarke to set a trap for them was the reason Tabbi had claimed, but as the heavy footfalls grow closer, Clarke knows it was also because it’s easy to set a trap for any adult foolish enough to come this far into their territory. 

There’s nowhere for Clarke to run, save for directly into the approaching people, so she firmly crushes her urge to flee and picks up her pack as the steps come to a halt behind her. She stands and turns, hoping to bluff her way out of it and praying that it’s just a routine patrol looking to stir up trouble with the kids, even though Clarke knows that no patrols stray this far out. Clarke tucks her chin down to hide her face and begins towards the group of warriors as if she belongs as much as they and the children do, but her eye falls on a familiar scar as she briefly scans their faces.

“Wanheda,” the familiar man addresses Clarke formally, and she sighs and pulls her hood back, disguise useless in the face of discovery.

“Arlen,” Clarke returns the greeting, such as it is, formally. “What is the meaning of this?”

Arlen, one of King Roan’s personal guard, nods at the warriors next to him and they advance past him towards Clarke. She doesn’t resist as they grab her arms and bind her wrists behind her back, simply raises her chin and stares down Arlen. He looks bored and vaguely disappointed as he answers her question.

“Clarke kom Skaikru, legendary Wanheda and advisor of the King, you have been caught stealing from the King’s kitchens and unlawfully distributing rations to the masses. With respect to your station you will be brought before the King and your punishment will be determined there,” he finishes the official sounding speech with a jerk of his chin. “Come.”

Arlen turns and walks through the alleyways Clarke had taken to get there, and Clarke follows with just as confident a stride, the guards lightly holding her elbows - more a formality than a necessity. She’s not stupid enough to try to run, rash actions such as deliberately disobeying Roan’s rule would only hurt her people. Clarke had planned for getting caught from the moment she decided her small rebellion, and she cements her speech in her mind as they come closer to the marketplace and skirt around it, likely to avoid people seeing Wanheda apprehended like a criminal.

Clarke will simply claim ignorance of the crime, if Roan interrogates her before his court. How was she to know it was wrong, feeding children was hardly a crime in Arkadia or in Polis. No one had ever sat her down and told her not to, and the kitchens has given her the food when asked. She would omit her own deductions and every vague threat she had given the cooks to obtain the food, and simply play the ignorant foreigner.

It takes longer for them to get back to the castle than it had taken for Clarke to leave it, mostly because of the roundabout route Arlen has to take to avoid most of the people. They approach from the back field, where frost still sits although now it is disrupted where the feet of workers have fallen. It doesn’t get warm enough to melt the frost anymore, although it had in the first few days Clarke was there. Clarke and her attendant guards disturb the crystalline cover on the earth even more as they march into the castle, proceeding to cross through hallways that Clarke drew an intricate map of within the first week when she was given freedom to roam.

Clarke knows the path they follow once inside, and she knows it leads towards Roan’s throne room. So he will punish her in front of his court, unsurprising to Clarke. Punishing Wanheda would prove his power and his ruthlessness, it’s a smart move. Clarke wonders what form the punishment will take and guesses it will be something physical, but likely not leaving a scar. Scars are sacred to the Azgeda, she can’t imagine the King gifting one to a criminal, even if that criminal is one of his advisors.

The door to the throne room is closed when they approach, but the guards outside of it nod at Arlen and very specifically do not look at Clarke as they swing it open. Clarke follows Arlen in with her chin held high, ready for her judgement and whatever punishment Roan and his court may give her. 

The room she steps into is eerily silent, and Clarke’s brow furrows as she looks around in confusion. The seats facing the aisle leading to Roan’s throne are empty, as are those for spectators above and behind the throne. The only people in the room are the guards, Roan, and Clarke. Clarke steels herself against every paranoid whisper her mind supplies about the meaning of this situation, instead fixing her gaze on Roan and attempting to convey to him with nothing but her eyes that whatever he has planned, he cannot break her.

Roan doesn’t shy away from Clarke’s glare, and a corner of his mouth twitches almost imperceptibly in a hint of amusement. He sits tall and comfortably on his throne, what looks to have been a permanent wooden fixture in the room when it was built, embellished now with steel and bones. It’s an intimidating piece by its nature, and it means to make the one who sits on it seems more fierce than the average human. Clarke doesn’t need a throne to tell her Roan’s worth, she’s seen him in battle and out of it.

The procession stops a respectful distance from Roan and the guards fall to one knee with their right fist clasped to their chest over their heart in unison. Roan nods sagely at that, although they cannot see him with their gaze fixed on the ground, and then he raises an eyebrow at Clarke, still standing in front of him and staring him down.

“Normally my subjects bow before me.” His tone is more amused than offended, and Clarke shrugs slightly.

“I’m not a normal subject of yours then, I guess.” Clarke challenges him with borderline insubordination, and Roan definitely suppresses a smile at that.

“Rise,” he commands the guards who move once again in synchronization as they regain their feet, “Remove her bonds and leave us.”

Arlen nods solemnly and turns with his knife sliding from its sheath almost imperceptibly. Clarke is very glad she’s still useful to Roan, because she’s relatively confident Arlen could kill her before she even knew he was coming for her, if Roan commanded it. He cuts her bonds deftly and leads the rest of the warriors from the room, and Clarke doesn’t move from where she stands, simply allows her arms to fall to her side. Clarke and Roan lock eyes in silence until the door behind Clarke shuts loudly, and Roan leans forward on his throne, resting his chin on his hand and seeming to study Clarke.

“What is this, Roan?” Clarke gestures at the empty room, “I could understand making an example of me, but you usually need an audience for that.”

“You're not one of my subjects, Clarke. You've never sworn fealty and obedience to me, so I'm not going to punish you under our laws. Plus, it wouldn't do to ruin the image of the mighty Wanheda by making you bleed in view of everyone. I still need you to be an untouchable legend by my side.” Roan sighs and pushes himself from his seat, stepping off of the dias and beckoning Clarke to him, “Walk with me. I won't punish you, but I also can't let you keep corrupting our children, so let me explain.”

“Yes, please explain to me how I’m the one ‘corrupting’ children when you’re the ones who leave them with no option but to steal and then punish them for doing so.” Clarke doesn’t even attempt to keep her scorn for the situation from her voice as she follows Roan out of the throne room through a door she’s never even noticed before, carved flush with the wall and well hidden.

“It’s not stealing that’s the problem, Clarke, it’s getting caught.” Roan waves off the guards who attempt to follow him as they step out into a sparsely populated hallway, tracing a route that Clarke knows but has rarely had occasion to follow herself. Roan doesn’t say more as they pass the occasional Azgeda noble, and Clarke doesn’t push him, knowing she can’t risk pressing him for details and possibly embarrassing him in public. Her only value is in that the public perception of her is still intact.

Eventually they reach Roan’s quarters, and the guards outside open the doors without so much as glancing at Clarke. These Azgeda warriors are part of Roan’s personal guard, and given that the last ruler was assassinated by her own son, Clarke can understand the need for protection. The Ice Nation seems to run off of blood, more so than any of the other kru Clarke’s had occasion to learn about.

Clarke has been in Roan’s quarters once before, after he officially welcomed her to the Azgeda in front of his court. He’d taken her here and explained exactly what her role was, and that she should watch her back. His grasp on the throne was weak in the first few days after their return, and he’d told her that people might seek to destabilize him even further by killing his greatest bargaining chip, which was her. He’d told her of the harsh nature of their culture in the privacy of his room because it was the one place in the castle that he knew he couldn’t be spied upon, or so he’d said.

Clarke lets her gaze slip over animal skins, bone decorations, and ornate sculptures of black stone. The stone sculptures are made of harsh edges, more impressions than actually detailed, but Clarke still finds a sort of harsh beauty in them. It doesn’t surprise Clarke that despite the luxury of Roan’s room, his bed is the only thing that actually shows signs of having been used. Consolidating one's power as King doesn’t allow a lot of time for admiring sculptures.

Roan walks past the luxuries afforded to him by his station, paying them even less attention than Clarke, and stops in front of a window. His and Clarke’s rooms are on the same face of the castle, looking out over Otta. Clarke takes up a position next to him and looks at the city below, attempting to see what Roan does. Maybe he sees beauty in the smoke curling above the streets, but Clarke just sees children freezing just out of reach of the warmth of fires. In the glistening frost caught on furs, Clarke sees small forms starving and being buried in snow.

Eventually, Roan speaks again, although he doesn’t turn to look at Clarke. “All children are given up by their parents on their sixth snowfall. They’re turned out onto the streets, and from that point onward, they’re expected to learn how to live on their own merits. Usually they earn their first scar after their twelfth snowfall.”

“And if they don’t reach their twelfth snowfall?” Clarke asks, regardless of the fact that she knows very well what the answer is. Roan looks up from the view in order to favour her with a look that states as well as words that he knows she’s aware of the answer to that one.

“It’s a hard life, but it’s what we have to do. Maybe the Trikru can afford the luxury of a childhood, but our land is harder than theirs, so our people must follow suit.” Roan turns his attention back to the midday sun shining off of the city and gestures to it, “You see the frost, yes?”

“Of course. More every day.”

“Snowfall will come soon, and it lasts a long time. By the time the thaw comes, everyone down there will know someone who’s fallen to the cold. And Otta is one of the easier settlements to live in.” Roan’s brows furrows and a small frown forms at the corner of his mouth at that, but Clarke deliberately ignores it.

“I still don’t see how this justifies forcing children to steal and then beating them when you catch them.”

“It’s hard for you to understand because you’re still seeing them as children. The Azgeda don’t have children, not like other kru do. There are infants, those not old enough to live on their own, and then there are adults fighting for the right to be recognized as such. We don’t punish children, and those that you see on the streets are not children. They’re unmarked adults, and as such unworthy of attention or assistance.”

“They’re six years old,” Clarke insists, and Roan clenches his jaw, now glaring at the city.

“Everyone has to grow up sooner or later.”

“So you choose sooner,” Clarke scoffs, unable to imagine being part of a culture like that, turning away from the window and walking to inspect one of the statues, not wanting to be so close to Roan. Clearly she can’t make him understand how wrong it is in general terms, so Clarke tries to make it personal, “Did you have to go through that, or are there exemptions based on birth?”

“All children are given up. My mother exiled me, do you really think that she’d give me any special treatment?” Roan sighs and turns from the window, crossing his arms over his chest and watching Clarke as she pretends to inspect a black stone bear, “Our land is hard, our people harder. They couldn’t be governed by someone who doesn’t know exactly how difficult things get. I’ve earned my position as their King, and everything that comes with it.”

“Children shouldn’t have to earn the right to live to adulthood,” Clarke states with heated certainty.

“Children have no place among the Azgeda,” Roan responds coolly.

“I can’t accept that there’s any way in which what you do is fair.” Clarke shakes her head and meets Roan’s gaze, crossing her arms and mirroring his pose. He narrows his eyes at her for a moment and then nods shortly, as if having come to a decision.

“I wasn’t going to do this, but maybe I can kill two birds with one stone here.” Roan breaks their staring contest and walks over to a desk with a sparse scattering of thin leather with black markings on it, picking up one of the sheets and tossing it at Clarke. She unfolds it and inspects the cryptic markings as Roan explains, “There’s a settlement far to the north, the last of the official towns under my rule. Except they don’t acknowledge that they are under my rule, and I need to head there in person to sort it out. I had considered bringing you with me as a show of power, but I’d thought you might not be able to handle the cold. However, since there’s apparently no way in which our ways are fair, you ought to have no problem with it, no?”

Clarke looks up from the leather to see Roan smirking at her, and she rolls it up deftly. “Of course not, I’ll handle it.”

“Good,” Roan respond with a wicked grin flashing at her, “That’s your requisition form for gear. The bare minimum, but it will serve well enough. Take it to Garet and he’ll see to it that you’re properly prepared.”

Clarke makes a mental note of the name, not actually knowing who Garet is, but knowing that asking any of the guards in the castle ought to work to track the man down. She nods, still too attached to her mindset of being in the right to actually doubt if this is a wise thing to do. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow at dawn. I suggest you not be late, or else I may assume the mighty Wanheda is too scared to carry out her mission.” Roan’s patronizing tone causes Clarke to roll her eyes and she turns from the room.

“I’ll be ready before you are.”

When Clarke is back in her quarters that night, looking over the packs that the very angry man known as Garet had given to her along with a string of Trigedasleng curses about “royals that don’t have the decency to give a man proper time to prepare”, she begins to doubt herself. There’s a lot of stuff in the kit that she doesn’t know what to do with, and if Roan’s to be believed, she’s going to need all of it. Clarke can only hope it will come clear with time, and she carefully repacks her bags and picks out one of her warmest outfits to wear tomorrow before laying down to rest.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I currently don't have WiFi (Thank you public libraries) and this was written and edited about a week ago, but hey, at least I got it up eventually! I am suuuper excited for this fic, and I hope y'all will enjoy it too! My free WiFi session is about to run out, so I'm just gonna leave this here for now and thank my fantabulous editor [Etra](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com), she's a life saver when it comes to writing.
> 
> Y'all can check out [my tumblr](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com), and thank you in advance for commenting/viewing/leaving kudos <3


	2. Two

Clarke feels like she’s barely managed to warm up and begin to drift off to sleep when she’s awakened by the sound of footsteps approaching her bed. She slides her hand under her pillow slowly as the intruder grows nearer, seeking the blade she keeps concealed while maintaining her breathing and attempting to appear asleep. Depending on the size and skill of her would be attacker, Clarke might need the element of surprise to overpower them.

The person pauses by the foot of Clarke’s bed, and Clarke seizes that moment of inaction to fling back her furs and leap at them, knife in hand and practiced muscles ready to deliver a killing blow. Clarke doesn’t enjoy killing, but she’s long past the point where she’ll hesitate against an assassin. It’s only due to the light shed by a single small flame near her door, probably brought in by the intruder, that Clarke recognizes them as one of the servants Roan had assigned to her. She can’t stop her attack completely, but Clarke manages to pull her knife back, resting it against the young boy’s throat instead of slashing through his carotid artery and letting him bleed out on her floor.

The boy, to his credit, stops and holds perfectly still as Clarke attempts to calm her instinctive response, every muscle in her body taut as her brain tells the rest of her that there’s nothing to fear, and no need to kill the young servant. Tashir, that’s his name. There’s no need to kill Tashir, Clarke tells herself, and she breathes deeply, slowly relaxing her grasp on the knife and lowering it from his throat.

“Rise and shine, Wanheda,” a familiar voice greets from the shadows, and Clarke sighs as she turns towards Roan, lounging in the corner of her room and casually cutting up an apple as if she hadn’t been a split second away from killing one of his people.

“I could have killed him,” Clarke states, anger with Roan flaring at the fact that he would send someone to wake her like that. He knows her reactions, has to remember from their travel to Otta that her knife wielding hands wake well before her brain does.

“And you didn’t.” Roan dismisses her anger simply, and then nods to the boy, “Carry on, Tashir.”

Tashir nods calmly, as if he doesn’t have a thin red line curving across his throat, and picks up Clarke’s bags from where she had left them the night before, at the foot of her bed. She flushes a touch as she realizes Roan hadn’t sent the boy to wake her, but to gather her things for their journey, but she bites back the embarrassment as she remakes her bed. It only takes a moment, but it’s enough for her cheeks to cool and to allow her to compose herself before turning to grab her outfit for the day, which is of course right next to where Roan is leisurely eating fruit.

“Did I oversleep?” Clarke asks as she walks over to grab the warm furs and supple leathers, yanking harshly on them to pull them out from under Roan, who seems to take great joy in being an obstacle.

“I decided we should leave earlier. Snowfall’s started, and there’s a fair bit of ground we need to cover before it gets too bad. Unless you’ve got a problem with that?” Roan raises an eyebrow at Clarke and she shakes her head slightly.

“Of course not. Now get out so I can get changed.”

“As Wanheda commands.” Roan nods to her and leaves her room, and Clarke allows herself to relax slightly. 

So it hadn’t been the most pleasant awakening, but she probably would have been up soon anyway. Her nightmares rarely let her sleep through the night without the aid of alcohol or complete exhaustion, so perhaps she ought to thank Roan for waking her before they could. Clarke takes a moment to stretch while deciding she’s not going to thank him for creeping into her bedroom, then quickly changes into her travelling outfit. Roan had originally decided not to bring her because he thought she couldn’t handle herself, and Clarke was going to prove him wrong. Which starts with being ready quickly, hopefully quicker than he thought.

Clarke slips through the mostly abandoned hallways, occupied only by a few servants tending the lights and doing bits of maintenance here and there, and takes the shortest route to the stables. She imagines that’s where they’ll be leaving from, and she steps into the warm, if dimly lit, building to see Roan already standing there with their horses, packs already loaded onto them. He doesn’t look surprised at how quickly she’d changed, but he also doesn’t comment on her taking a long time, so Clarke considers it a win.

She mostly ignores Roan as she approaches her horse, a white mare that she had named Nieve. Not the most original name, simply ‘snow’ in another language, but she liked it and it feels natural to say when using the Trigedasleng commands that had been taught to the mare. At first Nieve had barely tolerated Clarke, but Clarke had loved horses from the first moment she’d seen them, and she’d made it her mission to win the beast over. Now, Nieve only responds to Clarke, and does so beautifully.

“Good morning, beautiful,” Clarke mutters to Nieve with a smile while stroking her nose lightly, “Let’s see how they’ve rigged you up, huh?”

Clarke takes her time inspecting her horse, Nieve’s health and comfort more important to her than any opinion the King of Azgeda may have of her. She would far rather make Roan wait than set out with a strap digging into Nieve where it’s going to rub her raw, or something of the sort. So Clarke double checks every inch of the beautiful creature, and when she looks up at Roan as she finishes, she catches him watching her with an honest smile on his face. It’s gone in a moment, and Roan nods at her briefly in approval before mounting up, but Clarke feels like she must have surprised him by showing that much care for Nieve. Sure, she’d done so on their trip up, but maybe he’d expected her to have forgotten by now.

Clarke takes her seat in the saddle easily, determined to prove to Roan and herself that she hadn’t forgotten anything about travelling by horseback in the time she’s been in Otta. She follows Roan out of the stable and into the pre-dawn chill outside without prompting. Although Clarke is more than familiar with early mornings, that doesn’t mean she wants to talk, and so she appreciates Roan’s silence now. The horses’ steady pace changes tone as they leave the packed dirt and hay of the stable and begin to crunch their way through virgin snow and frost, and Clarke is glad that Nieve follows Roan’s horse with no prompting, because it turns out her imagination came nowhere close to supplying what snowfall would actually be like.

It’s beautiful. Thick flakes of snow drift almost impossibly slowly from the sky, catching the light of torches and spreading it so that the whole courtyard seems to glow. There’s only a thin layer of snow on the ground, and Clarke had thought that it would be like thick frost, but it looks so soft and appealing that for the first time, Clarke believes there is a certain beauty to the Ice Nation. It even seems to be warmer with the snow falling than it did the day before, but Clarke is unsure if that’s some fluke of the weather or merely a change in outlook. 

Clarke reaches out and catches a snowflake in the palm of her glove, watching it twinkle for a moment before melting. The snow is enthralling in a way that the frost had never been to her, and Clarke has a difficult time rationalizing that, to the Azgeda, this snowfall is the first sign of their most difficult and deadly season. The snow begs her to paint it as it clings to the ground in an ever thickening coat, and Clarke tries to look at it as the harbinger of suffering that she’s been told it is, but at least for now she finds that impossible. 

She drags her attention partially away from the snow, still feeling happier and more at ease than she has since her arrival as it continues to fall, and she notices that Roan isn’t taking them through Otta, but rather around it. Clarke urges Nieve slightly so that she can ride beside Roan rather than trailing after him, and Roan hardly glances at her as she takes a position to his right. Instead, he seems to be occupied with frowning at the snow around them as if nature in this instance is a rebellious child that’s trying to ruin his day on purpose.

The further they get from the castle and Otta itself, the harder it gets to see as the light from torches fades even beyond the dissipating qualities of the snowfall. Clarke begins to wonder exactly how much before dawn Roan got her up, but she forgoes asking. It won’t change anything, and the sun will still rise behind the clouds all the same. Clarke does hope it happens soon, though, she wants to see the snow more easily, wants to know exactly what the countryside looks as it’s softened by the frozen embrace.

It doesn’t take too long before the sky begins to lighten, the layer of clouds almost mirroring the blanket of snow on the ground. Clarke is careful to conceal her glee as she looks around at the untouched snow, not wanting to seem like a child, but inside her spirit soars. The snowfall is something that rekindles a bit of whimsy that she’d thought long since gone within her, that makes her want to use charcoals for more than drawing maps. For a moment, Clarke allows herself to indulge in a daydream where she’s not on a political mission, where she’s not responsible for keeping the peace and as such keeping everyone in Arkadia alive. In her fantasy, an infinitely younger Clarke is allowed to throw a snowball at Roan without fear that it could mean her or her people’s death.

“It’s too early this year,” Roan mutters, breaking Clarke’s reverie. She’s uncertain if he meant for her to hear it, but when there’s been no noise other than that of their horses since they left, it’s hard not to hear.

“Is the snowfall really that bad?” Clarke doesn’t really want her perfect view of the winter wonderland ruined, like the virgin snow being churned up by their horses hooves, but as always, reality takes precedence over fantasy.

“Yes,” Roan states abruptly, and Clarke decides not to press the matter. If it’s just going to be the two of them on a trip of indeterminate length, she might as well try not to piss him off on the first morning. Roan, evidently, comes to a similar conclusion and sighs slightly before softening his tone and elaborating, “The earlier the snowfall, the less time we have to stockpile supplies. And earlier snow doesn’t necessarily mean earlier thaw, so we’ll have to stretch and scrape for food by the end of this. It’s not going to be an easy winter.”

“Can’t you get support from the Coalition? Isn’t that one of the benefits of being part of the thirteen clans?” It seems a simple solution to Clarke, but Roan shakes his head.

“My people would never accept it. We live or die by our own merit, they would see me and every last one of them frozen and dead before accepting a handout from another kru.” Roan sounds almost proud, and Clarke can’t see why he would be proud of such stupidity.

“Then why did Azgeda even join?” It’s a puzzle that’s been vaguely annoying Clarke since her arrival in Otta. The Azgeda are proud of their culture to the exclusion of all others, and from what Clarke’s seen, it seems like they would rather have been wiped out than become the twelfth clan. Yet Roan bears the brand as did Queen Nia, so Clarke wonders what they were offered.

“My mother believed she could use her position in the Coalition to usurp Lexa and take over all the kru, assimilating them into Azgeda. She was never in it for peace, no matter what she told Lexa.” Roan’s expression gives no indication of if he approved of his mother’s plans or not, so Clarke prompts him once more.

“And now that you lead?”

Roan turns to looks at Clarke at that, and once again he seems to be searching for something in her, or perhaps just studying her. Maybe to Roan, Clarke is as much of an enigma as he is to her. Sure, they know each other disturbingly well in the fields of battle and subterfuge, but they don’t really know each other as people beyond that. Although who’s to say that there is anything to them beyond that, Clarke doubts it more with every passing day.

“I gave you my word for peace, and I intend to keep it.” It’s not exactly an answer to Clarke’s question, it certainly doesn’t explain why Roan accepted the brand, but it does at least satisfy Clarke for the moment to know that he doesn’t plan to carry out his mother’s idea.

They ride in silence after that, and Clarke’s mind doesn’t settle anywhere in particular. For the first time in a long time, she simply allows herself to not think. She’s not in a war zone, Roan hasn’t told her how long it will be before they get to the town, and she has no responsibilities until they do. It’s relaxing, despite the cold, and after a time even Roan’s frown disappears. He doesn’t smile, but he no longer looks supremely, personally disappointed by the weather.

The horses are steadily climbing a small hill when Clarke’s stomach finally wakes up and begins demanding food. She rarely indulges in breakfast, and had skipped the meal today, but it tells her with pangs that she is in no way going to get away with skipping lunch. A muffled growl informs her that she ought to get it food quick, and Clarke ducks her head as Roan glances at her, searching for the preserved food in her packs and trying not to be embarrassed by the noises her stomach is making.

“Don’t break into the rations yet, we’ll get a meal in the next town. We’ll need the pack food when we set out from it, the towns grow thin as you head north and there are few between us and our goal.” Roan cautions Clarke, and she has to defer to his experience in this case at least, no matter how much her stomach is hurting.

“What about food for the horses? They can’t share our rations.” It occurs to Clarke that she didn’t see any feed in their packs, simply preserved meats and vegetables for the humans. The way Roan is talking, it’s going to be more than a day to their ultimate destination, and the snow covering is going to make it next to impossible to find grazing for Nieve.

“We’re leaving them in the next town, they’re not suited to the winter in the north. They’ll be well cared for there, don’t worry.” Roan pats the neck of his mare, as if he’s assuring the beautiful beast as much as Clarke about the safety of their animals. 

It comforts Clarke slightly, although she still worries for Nieve. Roan seems to have as much respect for the horses as Clarke does, and she knows that no Azgeda would dare give less than spectacular care to the mounts of the King and Wanheda, but Clarke likes being able to care for her herself. Nieve and Roan are the only two living beings with her now that ever saw her outside of Azgeda lands, and they’re the only two with whom she doesn’t have to be Wanheda. Nieve is the only one that Clarke actually likes, and while she’s glad she’ll be cared for, Clarke’s going to miss her on the rest of the journey.

Clarke and Roan pass a few people as they reach the crest of the hill, merchants or travellers bound for Otta along the path cut by their horses, and none of them try to speak to Roan or Clarke. A few seem to notice the presence of their King and nod briefly while glancing at him, perhaps using his scars to determine who he is, but even they don’t say anything. Clarke is glad for it, the clamoring crowds following Roan’s coronation had put Clarke on edge. She doesn’t like drawing that much attention, especially not in the Ice Nation.

Clarke ignores the travellers as much as she can while still looking out for threats, returning most of her attention to the landscape around them as the ground shifts from rising to falling away before them. The town Roan had spoken of is revealed, huddled at the base of the hill and looking much like a smaller version of Otta. Somehow, though, it looks softer. Perhaps it’s the snow collecting on the fur huts, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s new and as such Clarke doesn’t know what cruelties may lie within it. She hopes she won’t have to see the children in this town, hopes that somehow Roan was wrong and not all Azgeda settlements cast their young onto the streets.

As their horses walk into the town, no longer the first to break the snow but rather traversing well muddied streets, people do begin to notice Clarke and Roan as more than travellers. Reverent words are muttered at Roan, a few people clasp their fists to their chest in salute, and everyone moves out of their way. Roan, in turn, simply nods on occasion and ignores it all. The Azgeda respect strength, and though he loves his people immensely, Clarke knows he can only show that love for them by trying to do his best as ruler. He will never be able to make speeches about it or assist the downtrodden, such a thing would distance him more from his people than being aloof and hard will.

With a path through the residents of the town appearing before them as they move, Clarke and Roan make quick time towards whatever destination Roan has in mind. Clarke is relieved to see smoke curling from the roof of the large building they stop in front of, and what seems to be a proper stable attached to it. She dismounts shortly after Roan does so, and a stern looking man approaches them from the stable, clapping his fist to his chest in a salute and bowing his head in front of Roan.

“My King, we weren’t expecting you so soon, but all is ready,” the man states in azgedasleng, the local dialect of the grounder language Clarke had first learned. In Polis, most had spoken in English because they knew of Skaikru and Lexa had commanded it, but only those in Otta who know Clarke speak English at all. Her fluency in the dialect spoken in the Ice Nation has improved greatly since her arrival, as a matter of necessity.

“The _pakstoka_?” Roan asks, using a word unfamiliar to Clarke.

“Prepared. Would you like to leave immediately?”

“No, a hot meal first.”

The man nods and turns to lead them into the main building, barking out orders for food as soon as they’re through the door. Servers inside hurry to fulfil them, and Roan and Clarke are taken through another door to a back room, away from the main dining area and the less royal customers of the inn. Clarke dislikes being treated so differently, but she also is grateful that she doesn’t have to be in a room full of potential threats, so she takes a seat without complaint. Roan sits across from her as the man pours them both a cup of something hot and smelling of spice and fermentation.

“Your meal will be here shortly. Tell any of the servers when you wish to leave and they’ll take you to the _pakstoka_.” The man salutes once again before leaving the room, and Clarke immediately strips off her gloves in order to warm her hands. They’re not exactly cold, but they’re definitely appreciative of being held closer to the fire.

“Cold already, Wanheda?” Roan’s tone is dry, and Clarke considers snatching her hands back from the heat just on instinct to prove him wrong, but she holds them in place.

“Hardly, but there’s no sense in not being warmer when we’ve got the luxury.”

Roan hums in response, taking a leisurely sip of his drink before saying, “You know, you might not be as badly suited to Azgeda life as I thought.”

Part of Clarke is proud. This is what she wanted, isn’t it? To prove to Roan that she was stronger than his land, that she was better than his assumptions. But most of Clarke shies away from the half compliment. To be well suited to Azgeda life is perilously close to being part of it, and no, she definitely doesn’t want that. She can’t agree with most of their ways, doesn’t even want to try and see it from their point of view. Sure, she might live the rest of her life among the Azgeda, but Clarke is determined never to be one of them.

Instead of responding, Clarke tries her own drink, delighting in the heat of it and pleasantly surprised by the flavour. It’s not exactly sugary, but it’s far sweeter than Clarke had thought an Azgeda drink would be. So far she had imbibed primarily water, with a few glasses of wine or rough beer at dinners. Perhaps, in this one small and insignificant case, her assumption of the Azgeda was wrong. 

Clarke is about to ask Roan about the _pakstoka_ and what that word means, but then steaming plates of roast meat and vegetables in gravy around brought in, and Clarke may be interested in learning new words, but that interest only goes so far in the face of food. It’s every bit as delicious as it looks to her, far superior to her first meals on the ground which consisted of half raw cat on a stick, and Clarke attempts to maintain her dignity while consuming it as fast as she can. Roan seems more than happy to eat in silence, and so they do. A server comes almost immediately after they finish to remove the plates, and Roan tells her that they’ll leave now.

They follow the woman, who left the plates behind in favour of the clearly more important task of escorting the King to whatever the _pakstoka_ are, through a door into the stable. Clarke glances in on Nieve as they pass, and her horse seems properly cleaned and fed, so she doesn’t hesitate to follow the server out into a field behind the stable and across it. There’s a building on the other side, a smaller stable from the looks of it, and the woman leaves them at the door to it with a small gesture.

Roan precedes Clarke into the shelter, and it takes a moment for her eyes to adjust from the light of snow laden skies to that of the lamps inside, but when they do she’s stopped dead in her tracks. Roan greets a man in the room who fiddles with a set of keys, walking over to a caged off section of the room and unlocking the door. Roan follows the man into the enclosure, and kneels down, holding his hands out to what Clarke can only assume are the _pakstoka_.

Clarke knows them by another name; _Canis Lupus_. Wolves.

The pack around Roan, sniffing him eagerly and wagging their tails, consists of over twenty gray wolves, and Clarke can see other enclosures within the building that have doors to the outside that are flung open to the snow. Clarke can only assume there are more packs outside, and that this one must be for them, for whatever reason the _pakstoka_ had to be ready for them. She watches the predators inspect Roan, acting almost like the dogs Clarke had seen in films.

“Wanheda, come here.” Roan doesn’t look up from the wolves, even scratching one of them behind the ear which just strikes Clarke as wrong. They’re cute and beautiful beyond reason, but Clarke has immense respect for the canine equivalent of the cats she used to hunt and doesn’t exactly want to get in a cage with them or let them swarm over her like they’re doing to Roan. When Clarke doesn’t follow his order immediately, Roan adds, “They’re not going to hurt you, if you’re scared of that.”

Clarke would never let her pride do something she was firmly against, but the subtle jab is enough to get her over her trepidation and into the cage. To her relief, the man doesn’t lock it behind them, leaving her a potential escape route if the wolves decide they’d like a piece of Skaikru for lunch. Roan beckons Clarke closer, and she reluctantly steps beside him and into the center of the pack.

“They’re going to take us the rest of the way, it’s only polite to introduce yourself.” Roan informs Clarke.

Clarke guesses he’s right, it’s probably best for the wolves to be familiar with her, so she kneels next to Roan and extends her arms as he had first done. The wolves who had been sniffing at her legs shift to inspecting her hands and arms, and other snuffle her back and hair. She tries not to be startled when one licks her temple, but she can’t quite contain her flinch, which causes the wolves to back off slightly for a moment, and Clarke feels oddly bad for having startled them.

She doesn’t try petting or scratching the wolves like Roan does, but she grows more comfortable with the pack around her quickly, and she realizes the introduction probably did her as much good as it did the wolves. Clarke stands with Roan does, and the man seems as pleased as any of the Azgeda ever do as he leads them out of the door in the back of the cage, the pack following happily.

The back of the building opens into small, fenced in fields, each one containing a pack of wolves frolicking in the snow. The one Roan and Clarke are in also contains two sleds, each loaded with the packs Clarke recognizes from Otta and some new ones. On the front of the sleds are contraptions of sticks and leather straps, and the wolves make a beeline for it. The wolves are shockingly cooperative as the man manipulates the straps around them, shifting the animals as necessary and dividing them into two teams, until he has them all strapped in to his liking.

“Fastest wolves we have, my King,” the man states as he steps away from the sleds, and Roan nods with satisfaction.

Roan doesn’t thank the man, but he does clap him on the shoulder before stepping onto the back of one of the sleds and gesturing from Clarke to the other one. She tries to mirror his position and hopes that the wolves know what they’re doing, because she certainly does not. She hadn’t even known the azgedasleng word for them until an hour ago.

The man opens a gate in front of them, leading directly out of the town, and Roan calls out a word to his wolves, who leap into action. Clarke’s pack thankfully follows suit without prompting, springing after the other team and away from the town. The sleds cut swiftly through the snow, and the wolves sprint ahead of them, pulling the humans and their baggage without really seeming to notice or care.

It’s startling for Clarke, at first, and she clings desperately to the sled to avoid falling off. She’s likely been moving this fast before on the horses, but then there was a whole, solid creature between her and falling. Here, it feels more as if she’s flying low to the ground, hovering over it on twigs and a prayer. It’s heartstopping and oddly exhilarating, and once Clarke gets over feeling as if she’s going to fall off and be left behind at any moment, it becomes more exciting than terrifying, if only slightly.

They cover ground far faster than they had with their horses cutting paths through the thin layer of fallen snow, and the wind cuts cruelly into Clarke’s furs without her fear to keep her from noticing. Still falling snowflakes whip at every inch of exposed skin, and Clarke tucks her chin as far into her jacket as she can, squinting at the form of Roan’s sled in front of her and making a mental note to wrap her face tomorrow. The snowfall is definitely more painful and annoying at speed, and Clarke hopes that it will stop eventually.

It doesn’t take overly long for Clarke’s wish to come true, as they move past the northern edge of the snow-bearing clouds, but it’s long enough for her to become as disgruntled with the snow as she had been fascinated that morning. Sure, it’s still gorgeous when she looks around, but now she’s thoroughly chilled, her face stings, and snow has crept into her furs clothing and melted, leaving her entirely uncomfortable. So maybe snow is a little less magical after almost an entire day spent in it.

The snowfall breaks gradually, the precipitation lessening and finally stopping, much to Clarke’s relief, long before they actually make it past the weather system. The thinning of the clouds is marked by the snow covering the ground growing brighter and shining like white silver, which renews some of Clarke’s spirits and whimsy with the winter. But then the clouds break, and the reflection of the sun off the snow doesn’t take long to become blinding. Clarke is blinking away freezing tears within minutes of the first true spot of sunlight on the snow, and she wonders how Roan can even be seeing to know where they have to go. Maybe the wolves know it well enough on their own.

The loss of cloud cover doesn’t just cause Clarke’s eyes to hurt, she discovers quite rapidly. She must not have been imagining that it was warmer when the snow started falling in Otta, perhaps the low clouds captured some heat and held it close to the ground. Because now, without the thick weather ceiling, it’s _cold_. Clarke’s nose begins to run, and sniffing it only succeeds in making her feel like she’s shoving daggers of ice directly into her lungs. She huddles into herself on the back of the sled, shivering, and looks at the wolves and Roan to see if any of them seem to notice it being freezing. Roan still stands as tall as ever on the back of his sled, and the wolves seem just as pleased to be running now as they did at the start. Maybe they’re labouring a bit more, their sides heaving heavier, but they don’t seem to show any signs of stopping.

Long before Roan stops them for the night, Clarke is desperate for the trip to be over. Every patch of fur which had been dampened by the snow felt like it had a personal vendetta against her when combined with the cold wind, and she swears her face must just be a block of ice. Definitely a face wrapping tomorrow, and layering on as many furs as she can while still being able to move. When the wolves slow to a stop at Roan’s direction, Clarke is convinced she knows what it is to be an icicle, and that she’ll never take being warm for granted again.

Clarke is still shivering and clinging to the back of her sled when Roan dismounts his and walks over. He stops a few paces away, and Clarke prepares herself for sarcastic comments which she definitely cannot form retorts to right now without her teeth chattering and undermining anything she says. However, Roan simply looks at her for a moment before walking over and holding his hand out, a silent offer to help her dismount. Clarke intends to reach out and take it, she truly does, but her hands don’t seem to want to release from the bar she’d been clinging to the whole time.

Roan doesn’t comment on that either, and somehow that just embarrasses Clarke more as she struggles to straighten frozen fingers. She does, thankfully, manage that much without his help, and then she takes his hand. She stumbles from the back of her sled with Roan’s assistance and is reminded in the worst ways of her first full day of horseback riding. Muscles she didn’t know she had feel torn to shreds, but this time instead of being chafed by a saddle, Clarke is wind bitten and chilled to the bone. Every step seems to be a struggle as Roan leaves her to go free his wolves from their harnesses, and Clarke tries to follow suit.

“Don’t worry about it, I’ll get them next,” Roan offers, but no, Clarke already allowed him to help her get off the sled. Even half frozen - okay, more like three quarters frozen - she’s determined to do her share of the work.

“I’ll manage,” Clarke states confidently, teeth barely even clacking now that she’s moved a small amount and feels a tiny bit less like a corpse afflicted by rigor mortis.

She approaches the first wolf, as she’d seen Roan do, and struggles with her frozen fingers and its frozen leather straps. The wolf doesn’t seem to mind overly much, panting in the cold air and mostly ignoring her save for licking her glove once. It takes longer than Clarke would like to admit, by the time she’s got the one wolf free Roan has four of his released, but she manages on her own. The next harness comes free easier, and after that Clarke’s fingers have feeling in them again and she gets her whole team unhitched without issue. The wolves trot over to join Roan’s a short distance from the sleds, milling together in one large pack.

Roan directs Clarke to gather firewood as he digs out food for the wolves and distributes it, and Clarke accepts her task gladly. She’d rather not deal with a pack of hungry wolves and although deadfall branches might be buried under snow, hacking off low hanging limbs isn’t the worst job in the world. Clarke tries to judge how much they’ll need for the fire for one night, but Roan tells her she’s got enough before she thinks she is. In this case, Clarke is willing enough to admit that he probably knows more than her. Snow, wolves, and freezing temperatures are all things beyond her current field of knowledge.

Getting the fire started is a more difficult task, and one that Clarke leaves to Roan as she gathers rations to be heated for their dinner. She _can_ start a fire, if need be, but it takes a long time and a lot of swearing. Working with wood that’s frozen and potentially damp from snow doesn’t seem like it’d be any easier, yet Roan gets it going in a shorter time than Clarke would have thought possible. Perhaps you learn how to make a fire quickly to keep warm, when you spend your childhood on the streets with the other Azgeda children.

“So,” Clarke begins around a mouthful of half-warmed meat pie that she’d been too impatient to wait to cook fully, “how much farther is this town?”

Roan pokes at his own pie, sitting close to the edges of the fire and getting much more warmed than Clarke’s, before answering. “Another full day of travel, maybe two.”

“Let’s make it one.” Clarke shivers, shoving the last bite of pie into her mouth and swallowing it quickly so she can hold her hands closer to the fire. The cold that had set in with the absence of clouds is only growing as true night sets in, and Clarke still hasn’t thawed fully. 

“It’ll be a hard day, we won’t stop until after dark. Sure you can take it?” Roan raises an eyebrow at her as he pulls his pie towards him with his stick, apparently satisfied now that the golden crust has charred away to black in most places.

“If it means fewer days, I’ll manage,” Clarke states confidently. 

Silence falls as Roan accepts that with a grunt that sounds like it could possibly be pleased or approving and eats his dinner, and Clarke doesn’t mind it. She shifts repeatedly, trying to finds some way in which the fire will actually warm her, rather than feeling as if it’s doing nothing more than holding off the freezing temperatures for a moment. Roan threw the last log on when they first set their pies to cook, and Clarke doesn’t know how they’ll manage through the night. They have their furs, but surely that’s not enough.

“Should I get more firewood?” Clarke asks as she debates taking her boots off to see if that will warm her feet any faster, and Roan simply shakes his head. “How are we going to stay warm through the night, then?”

Roan leisurely finishes his last bite of pie before responding, with a jerk of his chin at where the _pakstoka_ have settled on the other side of the fire. “ _Pakstoka_ are warmer than a fire, they’re built for this sort of weather.”

Clarke eyes the wolves warily. Sure, they’d behaved remarkably well through the day and she has no reason to believe that these wolves in particular want to eat her, but still, they make her feel the same as the cats she used to hunt did. It’s the knowledge that without a knife and good luck, she’s going to come out the worse in any altercation between them. Not the most comforting feeling when attempting to fall asleep.

“Are you serious?” Clarke can’t help the disbelief and trepidation in her voice, and she sees Roan smile a tiny smirk before smothering it.

“I mean, I could keep you warm if that’s what you’d prefer,” Roan deadpans, and Clarke isn’t sure if she should laugh or hit him. She settles for a glare before moving over towards the wolves and working her way into the drowsy pack.

Clarke blatantly ignores Roan’s soft chuckle at that, instead kneeling gently to avoid paws and tails, before laying down. The wolves accept her graciously, and she tries not to be entirely uncomfortable when they lay their frighteningly large muzzles on her legs, or drape their tails across her neck. It is weird, to be in the middle of a pack of predators who would probably gladly kill her absent their training, but as the warmth of the pack succeeds in thawing her where the fire had failed, Clarke can’t find it in her to think of a better sleeping arrangement.

She hears vague noises of moving animals on the other side of the pack, and Roan’s voice pitched deep and quiet mumbling to the beasts as he settles in as well. So it wasn’t just a prank he was trying to pull on the outsider girl, good. Clarke cuddles closer to a wolf as she listens to Roan fondly scolding one of the others as if it were a younger sibling, and she smiles a little. Maybe the day’s travel had been awful and tomorrow’s was going to be worse, but this right now wasn’t bad at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So for this chapter I researched dogsled teams at one in the morning. I... yup, this is my life.
> 
> Anyway! These chapters take me a fair while to write, so this isn't going to be a super speedily updated fic, but I'm gonna see this one through to the end because I actually _know_ the end of this one for once. Also I am in love with this fic and am seriously enjoying writing it. Thanks to everyone who commented on the first chapter, and a super huge thanks to [Etra](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) for being the best editor and actually reading through thousands of words of questionable quality!
> 
> As always, I'd love to chat with you guys [on tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) And thanks in advance for commenting/reading/leaving kudos <3


	3. Three

Clarke’s heart is racing and her chest feels encased with iron bands. She’s rooted in place, unable to move or speak, only able to look around. She’s in a field of snow, white ground stretching infinitely in all directions. She wants to move, tries to call out, but she’s all alone in the silence of this wintery world. Pain bites at her feet, and she looks down to see ice climbing up her legs. It cuts through her clothing, biting into her skin and spilling her blood onto the snow. Clarke looks around in panic for anyone able to help her, any way to fight off the rapidly growing threat, but there’s no one around.

Clarke is all alone, and she’s going to die.

She can feel the ice ripping through her skin, crawling down to her bones and taking up residence in her core. She tries desperately to move or to call out as her fingers freeze and the cold reaches her lungs, but to no avail. The freezing reaches her shoulders and then spreads up her neck, clawing for her head with nothing around to stop it. Once it completely takes her over, Clarke knows she will be no more. It’s only a matter of seconds now, her cheeks splitting as the ice cuts through them, frost reaching towards her eyes.

And then, out of nowhere, a flash of warmth on her cheek. The ice flinches away from it slightly, and it repeats. Clarke’s heart soars as the freezing melts away in the face of the patches of heat on her face, and then one of the flares hits her in the ear.

Clarke wakes up with a gasp, hand flying to her ear and smacking a muzzle out of the way on its path there. She grimaces at the wetness there, and pushes away the wolves who are still trying to lick her face. So the ice had been a nightmare, one which the wolves had graciously woken her from. Clarke sits up, restraining a groan at her general aches from spending a night sleeping on snow, and then looks around at the frozen land, illuminated by the moon, that she had been woken to. Not so different from her dream, but at least for now she’s warm.

“Morning,” comes a greeting from the sleds, and Clarke looks over to see Roan rummaging through his packs. She’s not alone here, either, and Clarke repeats that fact to herself as she shakes off the last traces of her nightmare and gets to her feet.

“Morning,” Clarke replies as she makes her way over to her own sled. She’s eager to bundle on more layers in order to trap the warmth of the wolves, and although she’s not hungry yet, she knows having food in her stomach is a good idea if their day of travel is going to be as long as Roan suggested.

As Clarke rummages through her supplies, eating her morning rations without really tasting them and digging out every scrap of clothing she packed, she keeps part of her attention on Roan. She almost expects him to make dry comments about her sleeping later than him, or about how many layers she’s pulling out to wear, but he doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to her. Instead, he’s staring out at the snowy field they’ll presumably need to set out on that day, eating his breakfast, a slight frown barely visible in the light of the moon. Clarke wonders vaguely if he’s frowning at the thought of the day ahead of them, or about how he’ll consolidate his power in the village that is their destination.

She almost asks him, but stops herself short. It wouldn’t change anything for her to know, so instead she focuses on things she can change and struggles out of her heavy furs, stripping down to her thinnest shirt before beginning to apply a new order of layers. Winter deer hide, with the hair turned towards the skin to capture her body heat and hold it, soft leathers to cut the wind, layers of fur before her thick coat in order to provide her with the most warmth possible. Clarke sets aside a fur mantle to wrap around her face later, and takes a moment to assess her current outfit. She can’t feel any obvious seams yet, but time and cold winds will soon tell her if she’s done well or not.

Donning her imposing fur coat once again, Clarke looks over at Roan to see if he’s finished his morning meal yet, only to find him staring at her. He seems to be frowning less than he had been when staring at the snow, and he nods briefly at Clarke when she meets his gaze. Her brow furrows in confusion as Roan turns away and whistles to the wolves, who happily trot over for a small feed from the rations on Roan’s sled. Had he been watching her to make sure she didn’t mess up dressing herself for the cold? Surely he could have just told her what to do; Clarke is confident Roan isn’t averse to correcting her in matters even before she’s been proven wrong.

“Do you need help with your team?” Roan’s voice breaks off any internal questioning Clarke had been doing, and she glances between the wolves and the contraption they hook up to. She had freed them from the harnesses last night and she probably could figure it out on her own, but Clarke knows it would be a delay they can ill afford.

“I’ll watch one.” Clarke swallows her pride which tells her that she can and should figure this out on her own, and walks over to Roan, who nods at her with an approving grunt.

Roan walks to the first harness on the lead, the one farthest from the sled itself, and whistles sharply at one of the wolves. It trots forward obediently, almost seeming to want to be hooked up, and the rest of the wolves mill about nearby. Roan moves confidently, strapping in the beast with sure motions while still making it clear enough to Clarke what he’s doing. He shows each strap to Clarke before securing it, and slides his fingers between the wolf and the leather after it’s tightened to show her the fit of it. 

When the wolf is strapped in, Roan scratches its neck and smiles as it licks his coat. The exchange between Roan and the wolf reminds Clarke of him caring for his horse, or the glimpse of adoration she’d seen on his face when he saw Otta again. A moment in which he was free to be Roan, just a brief second in which he wasn’t King and wasn’t thinking of the next step. Clarke wonders if he ever regrets having claimed the throne, but she shakes the thought away quickly. They’ve all done what they needed to do, having even a moment in which they’re free to smile is a blessing.

“Do you think you’ll need help?” Roan asks, still petting the wolf. Clarke shakes her head.

“I’ll be fine.” Clarke is confident now that she can do it properly, provided the wolves respond to her whistle as well as they do to Roan’s.

“Good, then hurry up. I don’t want to have to leave you behind.” Roan straightens and moves to the next free harness, and Clarke restrains herself from getting defensive. Better to prove him wrong and get her pack ready to move quickly than to make bitter comments.

Clarke takes her position by the lead harness, only a little surprised when roughly half the wolves follow her over to her sled. She doesn’t know if there’s a specific wolf that should be in the lead, so she simply whistles the same as Roan had, and hopes that the lead wolf will present itself. Either luck is with her or the wolves are supremely well trained, because a grey form trots up and waits directly in front of her, licking at her glove when Clarke reaches out to organize the straps around it.

She manages to get everything arranged properly, but tightening the straps proves to be next to impossible with her gloves on, so Clarke sheds them and almost immediately misses their warmth. She sets to adjusting the straps quickly, each second her fingers are exposed to the air a bitter urging for her to move faster. Although she rushes as much as possible, Clarke makes doubly sure that the harness is tightened properly. She won’t risk harming an animal for the sake of speed or her fingers.

As with unharnessing them the night before, the task gets easier with each wolf that Clarke handles. She manages to get them all tied in before her hands start hurting her too much, although her fingers are definitely not pleased over how long she exposed them to the cold. As soon as Clarke has double checked them all, she retrieves her gloves and looks over at Roan’s sled. Roan is already mounted, so Clarke wraps the fur mantle she had set aside to be a scarf around her face and takes her own position.

Roan glances back at her and waits for Clarke to be secure, and as soon as she is, he gives a signal to his pack and they take off. Just like yesterday, Clarke’s team follows suit, and they race out over the snow as the horizon just barely begins to take on the deepest shades of blue to dispel the black of night. Today, however, Clarke’s outfit seems to be holding against the wind far better, and she feels more secure being towed along behind the dogs. 

There’s no noise as the sun slowly begins to creep above the horizon, save for the gentle hiss of their sleds over snow, and the rapid pounding of the wolves’ feet. The world seems to be completely barren of life beyond Clarke and Roan, but it doesn't strike Clarke as foreboding and dead like her dreamscape was. This cold tundra feels like it’s simply sleeping, and the wind that nips at Clarke’s face above her face wrap isn’t malevolent. 

The snow seems to glow as the sun climbs in the sky, just as blinding as the day before, and it makes Clarke’s eyes water. Every time she blinks away the tears, her eyelashes cling together with crystals of ice, so Clarke tries to avoid looking at the snow as much as possible. It’s not an easy task when they’re surrounded by the stuff, but Clarke fixes her eyes on Roan’s back as it’s the only non-blindingly white thing she can focus on for more than a moment, and at least then she only has peripheral glare to deal with.

Even with the sun in the sky and her new clothing arrangement, Clarke still finds herself hunching over to try and conserve body heat before long. The wolves seem perfectly happy, and Roan doesn’t seem to be touched by the cold at all from what Clarke can tell, but she’s not anywhere near used to this. She wonders if someone who was raised in a climate controlled environment ever could become adapted to this sort of freezing. Stranger things have happened since they landed on the ground, but as Clarke shivers and squints against the sun reflecting off of the snow, she doubts she’ll ever be able to stand up to it as well as a true Azgeda warrior. 

The thought that she might never be as good as one of the Azgeda makes Clarke oddly sad and envious. As the wolves continue to race on over snowy fields that all look the same to Clarke, she wonders why it should make her feel that way. Probably she just wants to be the best at everything, it’s an expectation people have of her now, given to her along with the legendary status of Wanheda. It surely couldn’t be because she actually wants to fit in with the Azgeda. She had decided on arriving here that though she may live out the rest of her days with them, she would never be one of them, and Clarke fully intends to stick to that.

It seems to have hardly been more than an hour or two before Roan stops his pack of wolves, and Clarke’s slow to a halt beside his. Clarke’s brow creases in confusion as Roan gets off his sled, and she follows suit. She walks over to him quickly, wondering if there’s some emergency that she’s somehow oblivious to.

“Is everything alright?” Clarke prompts, as Roan begins to rummage through the packs on his sled.

“Everything’s fine. Here,” he hands Clarke a leather sack, and she looks in it to find chunks of frozen meat and what looks like lumps of solid fat, “split that up among your wolves.”

“Didn’t you feed them before we left?” Clarke asks, but she still turns away to carry out the task anyway. She doesn’t doubt Roan’s knowledge on when they should be feeding the beasts, she’s just confused.

“They need to eat a lot when they’re pulling passengers. We’ll have to feed them every few hours so they have the energy they’ll need, given how hard we’re going to push them today.” Roan sounds apologetic, and Clarke can assume based on how much affection she’s seen him show the wolves that it must be hard for him to make them work overly hard.

The wolves, on the other hand, seem perfectly delighted. They aren’t showing any real signs of exhaustion yet, that Clarke can tell, and they happily inhale the meat and fat she rations out to them. The pack’s meal is consumed quickly, and before Clarke has even really gotten used to being off the sled, she’s back on it again and they’re on the move.

They make another stop before the sun reaches its zenith, and then at midday they actually unhitch the wolves and build a small fire. Roan sets a fairly large pot of snow on it to melt, and they cook the wolves their midday meal as Clarke and Roan’s travelling pies warm at the edges of the fire. The pack greedily drinks up the gruel that Roan gives them, full of fat and water with a small amount of meat thrown in. Once the wolves are cared for, Roan returns to the fire, and Clarke pulls their pies out, handing one to Roan.

The eat in silence, but Roan keeps glancing at the sun and the northern horizon. For all that he’s not fidgeting or giving any obvious signs of impatience, the small glances are enough to show Clarke that he is concerned about their time, and she eats her meal as quickly as she can while remaining relatively unburnt by the filling. If it were up to her, they’d sit around the fire until they fully thawed, but she knows the importance of their mission, and Clarke doesn’t begrudge Roan for pushing their schedule.

“This might be dangerous.” Roan is looking at the horizon again as he breaks the quiet.

Clarke almost scoffs at the comment, “And your first days as King weren’t?”

Clarke can remember the angry looks from the crowds, the necessity of staying with the group of loyal warrior guards because there was no guarantee that people wouldn’t try to kill her or Roan. She remembers one man who tried anyway, and who bled out on the ground in front of Roan’s horse. In those days, Clarke slept only when exhaustion took her over, not knowing who might try and kill her if it suited their purposes, Roan included.

“This is going to be different. I don’t have any army this time. I just have you,” Roan levels Clarke with a measuring look, and she wonders if he’s regretting having brought her. But he doesn’t seem displeased as he looks at her. “We’re going to be far away from any support. If things go wrong, we’re going to be in for one hell of a fight.”

Roan pushes himself to his feet and turns to walk to his sled. Clarke follows him, feet crunching in the snow, and she wonders if this warning was simply to try and psyche her up. But she’d known from the beginning that this wasn’t going to be a joy ride, surely Roan knows that she’s aware of the gravity of the situation.

“Here.” Roan grabs something off of the sled and turns, handing it to Clarke, “If you’re going to have my back, I want you to have this.”

Clarke reaches out and takes the object from him, a slender sword in a black leather sheath. She doesn’t know too much about swords, despite having seen them used so much, but this screams quality to her. It’s more than a step above the salvage scrap metal weapons she’d seen used most often, and she grips the black wrapped hilt to reveal the blade itself. The sword slides smoothly from its sheath, and Clarke steps away from Roan to swing it experimentally.

It’s lighter than she had thought it would be, lighter than other swords she had held on occasion. Although it is awkward to hold a weapon larger than a knife, this blade feels good in her grasp. It moves freely, and Clarke thinks that with some practice, she could come to enjoy it. It makes her feel powerful, even though she knows she’s likely far less lethal with it than her knives, and she sheathes it and straps it to her hip gladly. Roan may have given her the sword to make himself feel more protected, but Clarke has a feeling that the weight of it at her side will help her feel better in a village full of people who quite likely hate them, too.

“Thank you,” Clarke says, knowing that a nice blade can’t have been easy to come by, even for the King of the Azgeda.

Roan simply grunts in response, then whistles for his wolves, and like that, conversation between them ends. They’re back in travel mode, mind focused on getting moving and covering as much ground as possible. Clarke gets her wolves strapped in quicker than she had that morning, even with the new weight on her hip. She’s hardly slower than Roan, and she mounts up quickly. Roan spares her no more than a glance to see that she’s ready before calling the wolves into action again.

As the sun begins its descent towards the horizon upon which it will set, Clarke tries to enjoy the snowy vista as she had yesterday morning. But the pleasure of the first few inches of snow seems to be gone, shivered out of her by the biting winds and cried out by the involuntary tears the blinding white demands. So instead of looking out at the frozen tundra and trying to remember what it felt like to look at it in awe, Clarke focuses on recalling everything she can about sword fighting.

It turns out, what she can recall is not a whole lot. She runs through every fight she can remember seeing, but she’d never been that focused on the sword work. Now, as the sun turns the white snow orange as it hugs the horizon, Clarke is mentally kicking herself for that. She knows they’ll be pushing past dark to their target, and now Clarke is wishing they would take two days to get there. She could ask Roan for tips on how to use her weapon; if anyone could teach her the ways of the sword, it would surely be him.

But her wishes aren’t reality, and Clarke knows this. So instead of agonizing over not really knowing how to use her new sword, she reminds herself that she still has her knives, and she plays out different potential scenarios in her head. Best case, the people of this village are so glad that Roan came personally to sort it out, they change their tune and recognize him as King. Worst case, they lure Clarke and Roan in, then ambush them. Clarke knows reality will fall somewhere in between, likely, so she tries to prepare herself for something closer to possible than either of those two.

The tears brought on by sun on snow are swapped out for the bite of even colder temperatures as the last hints of red sunset die away, and shades of black and blue take over the crystalline fields. The moon is still bright enough that it, combined with the snow’s reflective qualities, lights their path quite well. Clarke is glad for the light, even though she has no idea where they’re actually going. They could be on entirely the wrong path for all she knows, but at least with the silvery snow and the moon above them, she knows that they are on a path.

They feed the wolves once after sunset, and Clarke can see the tension in Roan’s shoulders. He doesn’t speak to her, and she doesn’t want to try broaching a conversation with him. The sooner they get to the village and sort things out, the better. Racing towards the unknown, but likely unpleasant situation that awaits them doesn’t leave much of a desire to delay and talk. So they get back onto their sleds, the packs of wolf food noticeably smaller now than they were at the start of the day, and they set off on what Clarke desperately hopes will be the final leg of their journey.

Their destination, when it comes into view, is the obvious, flickering orange lights casting visages of heat out onto the snow and brightening the night. Clarke aches for the fires from the first hint of their light, and for a moment she forgets that they won’t be welcome in this town. Her foreboding is driven out by thoughts of a warm bed, thawing her hands on a hot cup of spiced wine, and maybe even bathing. But then Clarke sees some of the lights approaching them as they get close enough to the village to make out the wooden buildings that make it up, and she remembers that these people aren’t going to be happy to serve King Roan and Wanheda. 

Roan stops his wolves a fair distance from the approaching torches, and Clarke’s stop next to him. She wants nothing more than to get off of the sled and shiver until she can get to a source of heat, but Roan is still standing on his, and Clarke knows that from this point forward she has to be the power piece in his pocket. Wanheda wouldn’t be bothered by the cold or a long journey, so Clarke straightens her back and pulls down her face mask to look as intimidating as possible. 

“Stay close to me, Clarke,” Roan mumbles to her as the lights grow close enough for Clarke to make out the group of a nine, and the displeased looks on their faces. Any response Clarke might have made is silenced by necessity. She’s scarier if she doesn’t speak, simply staring people down, and these people don’t need to hear her bickering with Roan about her ability to take care of herself.

“Who approaches?” An old man at the front of the group calls out when their torches are near enough to cast light on Roan and Clarke.

Clarke scans the group quickly. Six women and three men, and all of them look older than the warriors Clarke is used to seeing in Otta. But they still have that air about them, in the creases at the corners of their downturned mouths and their narrowed eyes. These people will not back down from something they believe is right, they’ve seen death enough to not fear it. Clarke hopes that they aren’t that bound to their denial of Roan as King, and she feels her heartbeat pick up as she realizes this could turn into a fight for the death at any moment. She hopes it won’t, prays that they are imposing enough of a figure to sway the villagers.

“Wanheda and Roan, King of Azgeda,” Roan announces. He never uses Clarke’s real name when speaking to his people, says it’s better if she’s just a title, a legend that’s one step removed from human. In this case, Clarke agrees with him. Anything to prevent these people from using the weapons she can see strapped to their hips and backs.

“A story for children and a pretender.” The old man spits on the snow in front of him, “The Azgeda have no King.”

“Would you challenge me, for rule of your village?” Roan asks the man, who grins savagely.

“Come away from your wolves, and I’ll prove to all Azgeda that you’re not worthy to lead them,” the man issues the challenge, and Clarke’s stomach clenches. She knows Roan is going to kill this man if it comes to combat, and she can’t see any way that it won’t.

Roan nods shortly and steps off of his sled, and Clarke follows suit a moment after. She falls in at his left hand, just half a pace behind Roan as he walks towards the group. The eight other than the old man encircle Roan and Clarke as they approach, and Clarke tries to look imposing rather than nervous. She keeps her hands carefully at her sides, not on her weapon as she wants to. Wanheda wouldn’t be worried about nine hunters from a northern outpost, Clarke can’t seem to be either.

The old man sizes Roan up for a minute before scoffing, commanding two of the torchbearers to bring the wolves in, and turning towards the village. Roan could easily stab him in the back right then, the motion either the move of a fool or a power move. But of course, Roan simply follows the man as he leads the way to the village, and Clarke is right next to him. If anything happens, Roan is her only ally in this place.

The village proper only takes a few minutes to get to on foot, and as soon as they step past the first building, the group surrounding them multiplies. Every person in the village seems to be awake and intent on seeing the showdown between their leader and the one who claims to be their leader. Everyone that Clarke looks at has marks of a difficult life on them, non-particular scars tracing their features, and a hardness in their eyes that you don’t get without having lived through pain time and time again.

The crowd continues to grow as they walk through packed snow streets, and Clarke’s heart is in her throat. She’s a decent fighter, grown better since coming to the Azgeda, and she knows Roan is amazing, but there are far more villagers than she had thought there would be. The sword at her hip is a comforting weight, as are the knives on her belt, but it doesn’t come close to preventing adrenaline from coursing through her veins.

They reach a clearing, more a wider part of the street than anything, but it has an all too familiar post in the middle of it. A trunk of a tree, gouged deeply and stained dark red with what Clarke knows is the blood of people who have gone against the Azgeda way. She tries not to stare at it, as Wanheda wouldn’t fear torture or the death by a thousand cuts. The old man grins at it, and then turns to face Roan and Clarke as the crowd spaces out, blocking off any exits along the street or between the buildings.

“You call yourself King of the Azgeda, and I call you nothing more than a spoiled boy. You want to lead us? You’ll do so over my corpse,” the man challenges Roan, and Roan locks eyes with him for a moment.

Clarke prays, in that moment, that Roan will be able to find another way out of it. But she also finds herself praying, as Roan nods to the man, that Roan will kill him quickly. Part of her shies away from seeing more death, but another large part of her realizes that the old man’s death is probably the only way that this situation will get resolved. She doesn’t enjoy that knowledge, but it is true, and Clarke steels herself to it as Roan inclines his head towards her.

“I’ll make it quick,” Roan mutters to Clarke, and she nods in response. For all that he’s promising to fulfill one of her hopes, it still makes Clarke uncomfortable. Roan knew this whole time he would have to kill the man, he never even tried to think of another way. That is the Azgeda way, after all, take what you need in blood and death. 

Clarke steps back towards the surrounding crowd, but not close enough for any of them to move against her without her knowing. She holds her shoulders squared and her back straight as Roan unsheathes his sword and walks towards the old man, who pulls an axe from his back. Clarke tries to look bored with the whole proceeding, despite being on edge. Although she knows that Roan will win, it’s a fight, and there’s always the chance for the unexpected in a fight. 

The old man bellows a battle cry and rushes at Roan, who could have easily sidestepped the attack, but instead catches the downfall of the heavy axe with his blade. It’s a show of strength, one that might win over the silent hunters watching the battle, but Clarke finds it needlessly foolish. Roan could have won the battle already, but he’s instead struggling in a fight of pure strength in order to look as impressive as possible.

The struggle ends up only lasting a few moments, and then the old man falls. Of course he does, Clarke has seen Roan fight before, and there’s no way that even exhausted after a full day of freezing on a sled, he would lose to an elderly hunter. Highly trained warriors have tried to take Roan out before, and it’s never worked in their favour. So of course, in a matter of seconds, the man is on his back in the snow, glaring up at Roan. 

“You will stand down and obey your King,” Roan commands, resting his sword against the man’s throat.

“The Azgeda have no King,” the man spits.

Roan doesn’t seem surprised by the response, and neither is Clarke. Of course, the leader of the village who had denied Roan’s rule would continue to do so even under the threat of death. This isn’t Otta, where the presence of Wanheda and a speech will be enough to convince these people that Roan has earned their trust. Clarke can see it in the scars on their faces, not carefully carved but wrought by the passage of too many hard years. They can’t afford to follow anyone who is less than them, and Clarke knows how Roan is going to prove he’s worthy of them.

She can’t look away as Roan hesitates for a moment, then presses his blade down swiftly. She wants to, good lord does Clarke ever want to look away from the blood soaking into the snow and staining it so vividly, just as she’s wanted to look away every time she’s seen people injured and dying around her. But Wanheda wouldn’t look away, so she steels her nerve and puts on a mask of calm as Roan withdraws his sword and flicks it to the side, sending drops of blood spraying. He looks up from the body and at the gathered villagers, a primal challenge in his gaze.

For a worryingly long time, no one moves, and Clarke wishes she had trained more with the sword strapped at her side. If this crowd turns on them, Roan won’t be able to fight them all, and she doesn’t have her gun anymore. She doesn’t let her growing fear show, instead tries to be an impressive ally standing behind Roan and bolstering his challenge.

_Obey your King_ , Clarke tries to command with her presence, while concealing the desperate addition of _please_.

A woman steps forward, far younger than the village leader had been, but looking no less stern, and for a moment Clarke fears that Roan is going to have to kill more in order to bring the settlement under his rule. But then the woman falls to one knee, clasping a fist to her chest and bowing her head to Roan. Roan shifts his attention from the woman to the rest of the crowd, sword still at the ready, and they waste very little time in following suit.

It’s only when the entire village is kneeling around him that Roan sheathes his sword and stands straight again. There’s something about the set to his shoulders that speaks of relief to Clarke, although she’s confident anyone who hasn’t seen him put on his mantle of King time and time again wouldn’t see it. To them, he would appear entirely confident, tall and strong and ready to remove any obstacles that stand in his way. He walks forward and stops a few paces in front of the first woman to bow.

“What is your name?” Roan’s voice is pitched to carry, the question not the basis of a conversation, but more the beginning of a ritual.

“Ary,” the woman replies steadily, speaking up in order to match Roan’s tone.

“Ary, do you speak for this village?”

“I do.”

“Who do you follow?”

“I follow King Roan of Azgeda,” Ary says without a hint of resentment, and Clarke breathes a little easier. It would be far too easy for these people to pretend to accept Roan, and then rebel as soon as they leave. She supposes that Ary could still be doing that, but for all of the Azgeda’s many strengths, acting has not been among them as far as Clarke can tell.

“Rise, and be part of the Azgeda once again,” Roan announces his final command to all the gathered people, not just Ary. The population of the settlements does as commanded, and they watch as Roan and Ary clasp forearms. There is no cheering or celebration, simply a few nods and then the crowd stepping away and moving on with their lives. Two of the people go to the dead man and carry him away, and Clarke fixes her attention on Roan and Ary to avoid looking at the deep red snow left behind.

“We’ll stay here for the night, and we need more rations for ourselves and our _pakstoka_ ,” Roan demands of Ary, and she simply nods. Ary’s attention shifts to Clarke for a moment, and she frowns slightly.

“The only place in the village with two rooms is the inn. I could offer you my room in the headmaster’s house, if you and Wanheda will be sharing a room, your majesty.” Either Ary genuinely has no opinion on if her King and the Commander of Death are sharing a bed, or she’s really good at concealing her emotions. 

Roan’s lips quirk slightly in a quickly concealed smirk as Clarke debates if it would be wrong for her to speak for the both of them and fervently deny that they would ever share a room. Roan saves her from needing to do so by accepting the first offer. “The inn will do fine.”

“Of course, right this way.” With that, Ary turns and leads them away from the bloody square and down a street towards a larger building made of wood. Other than Otta, Clarke hasn’t seen any Azgeda settlements that seem to use the buildings from before the nukes. She wonders if it’s on purpose, some tradition passed down by the first survivors striking out anew, or if there simply wasn’t that much left in the North.

The inn, when they step into it, is smoky and dimly lit, but blessedly warm. Clarke removes her gloves to allow the heat from the fire better access to her skin as subtly as she can. There are a few people eating and drinking at tables in the main room, being served by young children. It makes Clarke immensely glad to see children inside, not out in the cold, although the adults still seem to be paying the young ones as little attention as they can manage. A large woman emerges from the kitchen as what little conversation there had been cuts off at the sight of Roan, and she makes her way to them immediately. She stops in front of Roan and drops her gaze, clasping a fist to her chest.

“King Roan,” she addressed him formally, “what can I do for you?”

“Rooms for my advisor and I, and hot food.” Roan turns to Ary after making his demands of the innkeeper, “We need to sort out business before I can leave, and I hope to make my return trip tomorrow. Are there any others in the village you need to send for?”

“I’ll have them summoned here immediately,” Ary responds, flagging down one of the serving children and rattling off a list of names. Roan nods in response to that, and Clarke can’t help but notice the slight difference between the nod he gives Ary and the ones he’s favoured her with this trip. With Ary, there’s no hint of a smile, it’s almost more acknowledgement that she’s done what she’s supposed to, rather than the vague approval he gives Clarke.

With the child racing out the door, the innkeeper leads them up a set of stairs to the second story of the building. There’s just one hall leading from the stairway, and six doors off of it. The woman takes them to the last two rooms, opening the doors and stepping back to allow Clarke and Roan to make their own arrangements for who will claim which room.

Roan takes the last room, the one which only attaches to Clarke’s and the hallway. Hopefully he won’t need to make an escape in the middle of the night, but if he does, it’ll be easier to climb from the window than to try and fight his way through an entire inn full of potential hostiles. Clarke knows this, and that’s why she doesn’t even need to wait for him to move to claim the last room before she’s moving into the one next to it.

The room is sparse, especially compared to hers in Otta, but there’s a bed covered in furs and that’s more than enough for Clarke. She lays her gloves on a small table, the only other furnishing in the room save the bed, and shrugs her heavy overcoat off, hanging it on a peg behind the door. The room is just as warm as the inn below, even without a fire in it, and Clarke is sorely tempted to continue shedding layers and to climb into that bed right away.

Roan clears his throat from the doorway behind her, and Clarke smothers a groan as she turns away from the oh so inviting idea of sleep and back towards her responsibilities. Roan has shed his gloves and coat, too, now wearing a leather vest with fur lining over a long sleeved shirt, as he leans against Clarke’s doorframe.

“Dinner is being sent up to our rooms, and the village leaders and I will be handling business in my room. Sorting out how my rule will affect them,” Roan states, and Clarke nods shortly.

“We leave tomorrow?” Clarke asks.

“If we can manage it.” Roan says, and Clarke can’t think of any response to that other than another nod. Roan remains where he is, despite the apparent end of the conversation, studying Clarke like he seems he wants to do these days. It seems different from when he had stared at her in the throne room, less searching and more simply observing, and Clarke shifts slightly under his gaze. It’s not precisely uncomfortable, but it also feels more personal than Clarke would like. Sure, Roan knows her better than anyone in Azgeda territory, and Clarke may know Roan better than anyone in this village, but she shies away from thinking that they actually understand each other or have any sort of personal relationship.

“You’re welcome to join us, if you would like,” Roan breaks the silence with an invitation.

“Do you need Wanheda for the meeting?” Clarke asks, not wanting to put on the air of Wanheda for the rest of the evening, but prepared to if need be. Roan shakes his head, however, and drops his gaze.

“No, I suppose not. Good night, then.” Roan pushes off the doorframe and steps out into the hallway, just as a child passes him with a platter of steaming meat and vegetables, which they place on Clarke’s table before whisking back downstairs.

“Night,” Clarke responds, as Roan steps out of view of her doorway and presumably into his own room. She steps forward to close her door, frowning a little at the interaction.

Why had he invited her, if he didn’t need her? It’s not like she’s actually a political advisor, she knows exactly how much respect Roan had for her as a leader, and for her people in general. He would never actually want advice from the fake Wanheda, leader of the foolish Skaikru. Right?

Clarke mulls over the concept as she eats her meal, and she even considers going over to take him up on his offer. Surely, that’s the only way to know if he actually wanted her there, or if he was trying to be polite. Clarke doesn’t honestly know which one would be more strange. As she scrapes up the last of the gravy from the meat, Clarke resolves to remove her travelling layers, don her imposing coat, and to go over to Roan’s room and attend the meeting. 

But Clarke makes the mistake of sitting on the bed to remove her layers, and once she’s sitting down it is far too tempting to strip off all but her thinnest layer. It seems like the mattress and the furs drain the energy out of her, because every second that she sits there removing furs and leathers, Clarke grows more and more exhausted. By the time she’s got her travelling gear removed, Clarke is half asleep, and there’s no way she’s getting back up without a catastrophe. She crawls up the bed and under the furs, and Clarke is asleep in seconds.

The nightmares seem to find her not long after. And of course, as Clarke opens her eyes in her dream, it’s to a pure white field of snow. She attempts to walk, but it seems that only her head is able to move. The first gentle brushes of panic touch her heart at that, but just being alone and immobile in a field isn’t quite on par with most of Clarke’s nightmares.

And then the screaming starts.

Clarke wrenches her head around at the cries she hears behind her, but there’s nothing there save the snow. Snow turning red, melting and saturating with blood, and Clarke really doesn’t want to turn her head back, because the screams are behind her again and she knows those voices. She seems powerless as her head turns, however, and Clarke sees the source of the cries of agony this time.

Her people. All of the Skaikru, on their knees in the snow and staring up at her. Around them, towering giants with scarred faces, furs on their shoulders not strips of hide, but whole dead wolves. She stares up at the massive Azgeda, expecting them to be the cause of the screams and not knowing how she could possibly stop them, but none of them move as the cries escalate. And then Clarke turns her attention to her people, actually looking at them for the first time, and she can’t help but add a horrified shout of her own to the mix.

The Azgeda aren’t doing anything to her people. No, they’re just watching as the Skaikru gathered on the snow are shredded apart by the ice. It grows from the snow in blades, cutting up through Clarke’s friends and drenching the white purity in red. Clarke can hear them cry out, calling her name, begging for help as they’re torn apart. But she can’t move, and the Azgeda are simply watching impassively. She calls out to them, begging them to help her people, to fight back the cold, but they simply stand there. Clarke watches as everyone she cares about bleeds out on frozen blades, and she struggles to move, to save even one of them, but she can’t. She never can.

Clarke is ripped from sleep suddenly to a hand touching her shoulder, and her knife is in her grasp in a heartbeat, before she’s even truly woken up. With her free hand, she grabs her attacker’s wrist to pull them down and control where they land, and she brings her blade up to meet their neck as they fall. Or she would have, except as soon as she began her instinctual reaction, she was thwarted. Large hands grip her wrists, and she finds herself pinned down by a far heavier person than herself. Clarke struggles violently, but to no avail, and then her conscious mind actually catches up with the situation and looks at her attacker, barely visible in the darkness of her room, but familiar enough that shadowed features reveal their identity.

“Roan?” Clarke whispers harshly, and she feels his body shift with a relieved sigh before he releases her and moves away. Clarke sits up in an instant, reaching for where she left a candle and flint next to her bed. It takes a little fumbling, but soon there’s light enough in the room for Clarke to actually see.

The first thing that strikes her is that Roan is only wearing a baggy shirt with laces undone to midway down his chest and loose pants, and he doesn’t have a weapon. Clarke can only imagine these are his sleeping clothes, given that she’s never seen this particularly unimposing outfit before, and it tells her that he hasn’t woken her so rudely because there’s an emergency and they have to flee. Then Clarke notices how entirely exhausted Roan looks as he sits on the edge of her bed and rubs a hand over his face.

“You nearly gave me a new scar, Wanheda,” Roan comments, his voice even more gravelly than normal.

“I nearly killed you. Why did you wake me up like that?” Clarke doesn’t apologize for her reaction, feels justified in the violence of it because Roan knows that she sleeps on a hair trigger, when she sleeps at all.

“You were calling out for help.”

_Help! Please help them!_ Clarke shudders at the memory of herself screaming in her dream. 

“Oh, sorry.” Now Clarke does feel remorse, and a flash of shame. He had only been trying to wake her from a nightmare, something she should be able to deal with on her own, and he had done so knowing full well that she sharpens her knife almost every day. Roan simply grunts at her apology, and Clarke considers moving to sit next to him on the edge of the bed, but she’s embarrassed enough about having woken Roan without having him look at her. Right now he’s staring at his clasped hands, and that works fine for Clarke.

“Nightmares?” Roan asks after a moment, and Clarke nods despite the fact that his back is to her.

“It’s ice.” Clarke can still vividly remember it clawing at her, consuming her friends and family while faceless Azgeda simply watched, “It freezes everything and it never stops.”

Roan is silent for a long time, and Clarke contents herself with studying his back. Looking for signs of tension, she tells herself, telltale bunching of shoulder muscles that indicate if he’s uncomfortable or lying. In reality, she’s more studying how the thin fabric of his shirt drapes over his musculature, trying to see if she can pick out hints of the intricate scar she knows is carved there through it. She would like to draw it one day, she thinks, and then immediately blames that thought on being tired and having been jolted out of sleep so abruptly. There’s no place in her life for drawing anymore, she tells herself sternly.

“You’re right to fear the ice,” Roan’s voice breaks the silence, “it will kill anyone who isn’t ready for it. But you’ve proven you can handle it.”

“My people can’t.” Clarke doesn’t know if it’s the sleep deprivation, or if truths are simply easier to tell in dim lighting in the middle of the night, “They wouldn’t know how to adapt to this.”

“You’re friend to the Azgeda, and Skaikru are of the Coalition. We would protect them,” Roan says it with a fierce certainty, and Clarke is glad for the words. She’s sure the part of her that supplies her with nightmares won’t believe them, but they do aid in comforting her waking mind. Not that she can ever imagine Skaikru needing to come to the North, but having the word of a King to protect them doesn’t hurt in case the situation does arise.

Roan pushes himself to his feet and walks to the door of her room, not looking at Clarke once. “Get some rest,” he throws over his shoulder as he leaves, and Clarke doesn’t move until the door is latched behind him. She considers getting up since she’s awake anyway and is unlikely to be able to get back to sleep, but instead she extinguishes the candle and tucks herself back under the covers. Even if she can’t get to sleep, she should still at least attempt to follow Roan’s instructions and rest some more.

When Clarke wakes again, it’s to a small knock on her door, and she rises from her bed to let in a man carrying a tray of food for her. She feels far better rested as she eats the meal, and she pulls on her travelling gear in decent spirits for the early hour. The midnight conversation with Roan almost seems as much of a dream as the nightmare which caused it had been, even less real in some ways, and Clarke resolves not to bring it up.

Clarke walks down the halls with her pack in hand and is unsurprised to find Roan waiting by the front door with his gear ready. She is a little surprised that he looks so well rested, given that he had been up later than her, finalizing business with the village, and then he’d had to deal with her nightmare. But she guesses a King isn’t supposed to look exhausted, so Roan would likely look ready for anything whenever he’s anywhere that his people might see him. 

“Wanheda,” Roan acknowledges Clarke with a nod, using her title likely for the benefit of the few people silently eating breakfasts of their own. Clarke simply returns Roan’s nod and follows him as he walks out of the inn.

The sun is already shining bright in the sky as they step out onto the street, and there are a few villagers crunching their way through the snow. They hardly even seem to notice Clarke and Roan as they pass, focused on whatever tasks they need to do for the day. Clarke sees some people leaving the village with traps dragging behind them, setting out towards the forests, and others fixing houses and shoveling snow away from doorways. Everyone is working, and occasionally glancing at the sky.

Clarke follows their glances to the south and sees the reason. Dark clouds, just barely visible, but definitely bearing snow in them. She had thought, given the depth of the snow and the pervasive cold, that this area had already seen its snowfall. But the clouds seem to indicate otherwise, as does the frown on Roan’s face as he looks at them.

“We’ll be heading right into the teeth of it,” Roan muses, and then he inclines his head towards Clarke with a quirked eyebrow, “Are you prepared for this?”

“Didn’t we leave in that?” Clarke asks, gaze still fixed on the looming clouds, recalling the heavy cover that had been laying over Otta when they’d left on their horses.

“We left _ahead_ of that. Either tonight or tomorrow, you’ll get to see a proper snowfall.” 

Clarke considers asking Roan about what a proper snowfall is if what they had ridden in didn’t count, but then they round a corner, and their teams of wolves are there, all harnessed up and ready to go. The packs on the sleds are fuller, and Clarke can’t help but smile at the beasts. She definitely feels more fondly for them than she had upon first meeting them, and she scratches the neck of her lead wolf as Roan does the same to his. She guesses it’s hard to be afraid of something or not feel some affection for it after cuddling it for warmth. 

Clarke and Roan check over the wolves and the packs on their sleds quickly and efficiently, and they get on their sleds almost in unison. Roan looks back at Clarke, and she gives him a nod. She swears she sees a small smile on his lips before he turns back to the snow ahead of them and calls the wolves to action. They leap into motion, and Clarke pulls her face covering up as the wind whips at her face. 

They don’t push the wolves nearly as hard as they had the day before, pausing more frequently to feed them and stopping for longer when they do so. The clouds continue to grow on the horizon, but the sun shines brightly on Clarke and Roan, and Clarke feels in the best spirits she has for a while. They aren’t under a deadline anymore, they’re travelling towards a city which is as safe as anywhere in Azgeda lands is for Clarke, and they accomplished their goal.

Thinking of that does put a damper on Clarke’s spirits, however. She can’t help but think of the price of bringing the last village under Roan’s rule. She knows it was necessary, she’d seen the differences in the outpost compared to Otta. Older warriors still walking around, children not being left out to starve, it all speaks to necessity. The people had still been as fiercely strong as the rest of the Azgeda, so for them to have sub-par warriors means that they need every person that can manage to live in that village.

Despite that logic and necessity, Clarke still sees the red of the snow, and it eats at her more and more as the day goes on. Roan had been as merciful as he could, giving the man a quick death and even offering him a chance to change his ways prior to death. But Clarke still wonders if there wasn’t some other way that the whole thing could have played out. With any other kru, she’s certain that there could have been a better solution. She had been just as certain about Azgeda at one point, but now… She still hopes for it, but perhaps her belief that there’s a more peaceful way is less sure.

They stop for the night long before Clarke had thought they would, and before they hit the clouds. She isn’t opposed to a shorter day of travel, so she simply unharnesses her wolves and sets out to gathering firewood. Roan feeds the wolves, and they set about preparing their temporary camp without talking. They don’t really need to, and given that Clarke’s been thinking about Roan killing the man for too many hours now, she doesn’t exactly feel like striking up a conversation. Roan seems content with the silence, and he sets their rations to warm by the fire as the last rays of the setting sun fade away. They eat in silence, too, and it only allows Clarke to obsess over the cost of the village’s loyalty even more. The more she thinks of it, the less it’s a victory.

“Did you have to kill him?” Clarke has to ask, eventually, the image of the old man falling far too easily before Roan’s sword persistent.

Roan shifts to look fully at Clarke, squinting and studying her in the way she’s grown far too used to. Looking at her like a puzzle that he doesn’t know how to solve, or like something out of place. As he studies her, Clarke thinks of the reasons he’ll likely use to explain his actions. It’s the Azgeda way, it was the only way, it’s what the old man would have wanted, it’s what’s best for his people… They’re all excuses Clarke’s heard before, and none of them even touch on being decent reasons for her. In that moment, she’s not even certain why she keeps questioning these things, when it seems she’ll never get an answer good enough.

“Why do you hate me, Clarke?” Roan’s response stops Clarke’s train of thought dead, completely unexpected. She opens her mouth, but she doesn’t have a reply ready, so she closes it again with a frown.

Because he’s merciless? But Clarke knows that’s not true, she’d seen him spare Bellamy and he’d never killed people without a reason - however flawed - behind it. He’s cruel? That’s even further off the mark, he’d never hurt her even when she was his prisoner, and he’d given her far more leeway in her current status as political pawn than she realistically was entitled to. Plus, she’d seen him happily playing with the wolves, and tending to his horse with a careful hand, she _knows_ Roan isn’t a bad guy.

“I don’t hate you,” Clarke says slowly.

“So you hate the Azgeda?”

Clarke thinks of the cruelties she’d seen inflicted on the children in Otta, and of the man dying because he wouldn’t accept Roan’s rule. She thinks of Queen Nia scheming to overthrow or kill Lexa, but she can’t think of that without realizing she had schemed right back and convinced Nia’s own son to turn against her. Alongside the images of children ganging together for support and strength, there’s her very recent memories of freezing cold and the relief of curling up with the wolves at night. The old man dying in front of his village is her father, being floated for trying to do what he thought was right.

“I… I don’t know.”

“A week ago you would have said yes.” Roan seems to wait for a response after that, still studying Clarke, but she doesn’t know what to say. For all that she thought she was acting logically and thinking since coming to the North, she now realizes she really wasn’t. She was still clinging to the life she left behind, still just reacting and lashing out because she didn’t want to accept any other way of survival. Roan nods shortly to her, apparently accepting her silence as response enough, and gets to his feet.

He’s already scratching the necks of the wolves and kneeling to go to sleep among them when Clarke thinks of the question that she actually wants the answer to, rather than the one she had asked at the start.

“Did you want to kill the old man?”

Roan stills his movements for a moment when she asks the question, noticeably freezing before continuing to lay down. Clarke thinks for a moment that he’s ignoring her, pretending he didn’t hear her question when he obviously did. But then she hears one word, just barely registering over the sounds of shifting wolves.

“No.”

And that makes Clarke feel better than all the explanations of why the Ice Nation seemed to do terrible things ever did. Knowing that, at least for Roan, it’s a matter of necessity and tradition, rather than desire. Sure, their actions are extreme, but weren’t the measures taken on the Ark just as bad in some regards? None of them liked it, but they accepted it. If there’s one thing Clarke has had drilled into her time and time again, it’s that some terrible things need to be done sometimes in order to survive. Maybe that’s all the Azgeda are trying to do.

Clarke stays staring into the fire until the flames die out and the embers follow suit, thinking about everything she’s seen so far, and everything she’s done. By the time she crawls in among the wolves, she still is no closer to knowing the answer to if she hates the Azgeda or not, but at least she’s thinking about it now. She tries to work through her emotions and concepts before drifting off to sleep, but the pack around her is warm and the journey hasn’t been easy. The gentle huffing of sleeping dogs lulls her to sleep quickly, and her unconscious mind doesn’t worry her thoughts with moral dilemmas anymore.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OKAY, SO I'M WAY LATE WITH THIS, I'M SORRY. Hopefully the 10k word count makes it up to you guys? I want to say that I won't take as long with the next chapter but I honestly just shouldn't make promises like that at this point. It should be a good one, tho, when I get it done!
> 
> So I once again studied dog sled teams at 2am. Did you know they actually won't drink water to hydrate themselves normally, so you have to feed them fat and gruel with high water content to keep them hydrated? They can also eat up to 70% of their daily caloric intake as fat.
> 
> [Etra](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) is the absolute best and edited this beast which was written so weirdly in parts (I blame sleep deprivation and writing it in too many sittings), y'all should shoot her some love.
> 
> Anyway, if you want to talk to me, feel free to drop by [my tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) And thanks in advance for commenting/reading/leaving kudos <3


	4. Four

The ice comes back to Clarke in her dreams. Each time that it comes to attack her and her loved ones, it’s as awful as it was the first night. When she wakes, she’ll be annoyed with herself for being so afraid of the same nightmare again, but right now she is helpless to do anything as she freezes in place and waits. She knows what is coming, and the pain and terror the cold will bring her, and that she won’t be able to do anything. Regardless, she tries to fight it, as she always does. 

She struggles against her invisible bonds, and oddly enough, they slacken. Clarke moves an arm curiously, and she can raise her hand in front of her face in her nightmare. She takes a slow, unsteady step out of the point where the ice would have split her open and bled her onto the snow. She can still feel something around her, like the force that had once held her in place, but far kinder. It feels solid and warm, a support rather than restraints. Clarke looks around, and under this new force, the frozen wasteland of deadly ice becomes the softly shining snowscape that the lands around Otta had been when she’d ridden through with Roan. It’s strikes a cord of peace within Clarke’s heart, a gentle touch to silence the ghost of impending doom, and then the dream melts away.

Clarke indulges in waking slowly, clinging to shreds of that peace and reveling in the warmth of the wolves around her. Her nose, as always, seems to have managed to turn into an icicle, so Clarke rolls over to tuck it into the fur of the wolf she can feel behind her. In her half-doze, she can still feel that comforting support around her, and a smile creeps onto Clarke’s face as she nuzzles into the _pakstoka._ The wolf’s chest rumbles, deep and pleased, and a little curiosity nags at Clarke, tempting her towards wakefulness.

Because wolves don’t make noises like that, right? And although they’re large, they’re not that large. And they _definitely_ can’t hug you closer to them with another contented grumble.

Clarke’s eyes fly open and she leans her head back as far as she can with the remarkably secure grasp she’s in. She supposes she shouldn’t be surprised to see Roan’s face relaxed in gentle slumber very close to hers, but it still is a shock. It’s even more of a shock when her brain finally catches up with the fact that those are his arms around her, and it had been the furs over his chest she had been nuzzling her face into. No wonder she’s warmer than she had been the night before.

For a moment, just the briefest flicker of a heartbeat, Clarke almost wants to lay back down and doze off again. Sure it’s Roan, but he’s warm and she had managed to avoid her nightmare, and he looks to be sleeping happily enough. But then that flicker passes with the whimper of an actual wolf from behind her, and Clarke slips out of Roan’s grip as delicately as she can. A frown creases Roan’s features, but Clarke manages to gain her freedom before he actually wakes, and she shifts away from him towards the source of the concerned whimpering.

The wolves glance over at Clarke’s movements, and their ears are laid back, chins tucked low to the ground as they return their attention to the sky. Clarke’s mind seems to be taking its sweet time about freaking out over having cuddled the King of Azgeda, and before she manages to question why that is, she sees what the wolves are looking at. It fills her vision and strikes within her the same gut wrenching sense of wrongness that her dreams do.

The storm they had ridden towards the day before is almost upon them. In the distance Clarke can see trees moving, barely blurs on the horizon yet being whipped violently enough to be noted. The skies are black and sickly yellow, and there’s a haze connecting the clouds to the ground that Clarke can only assume is an unholy amount of snow. The encroaching storm flickers with lighting, trapped within it and never striking the ground that she can see.

“Clarke?” Roan’s voice rumbles, the snow creaking as he rises, and Clarke can’t find it in her to respond. 

How are they supposed to make it through that storm? Were it just wind and rain like she’s used to, Clarke would be far more confident in their chances. But she’d never seen snow before a few days ago, let alone a snowstorm like the one about to hit them. Snow doesn’t just drain away, how are they supposed to not get hopelessly lost?

The ground behind Clarke creaks again and she can hear Roan brushing his furs off, but she’s still entranced by fear. She doesn’t need to experience that storm to know it’s bad news, and right now she is desperately wishing she hadn’t come along on this trip. If it were up to Clarke, she probably would have waited for the storm to hit them right there, curled up with the wolves. But a heavy hand falls on her shoulder, snapping Clarke out of her cycle of hopelessness, and she breaks her gaze from the impending doom to look up and Roan standing next to her.

“We’d best get moving,” Roan states, simple and calm. It’s just a few words, but it’s enough to get Clarke to her feet.

“That can’t be normal.” Clarke’s voice is small as she glances at the clouds again, forcing herself to move to their sleds and start prepping to move instead of getting drawn into fear again.

“Some years are better, some are worse.” Roan glances from his own sled to the skies for a brief moment, hardly seeming to care at all about the howling wind and thundering that grows louder with every passing second, “This might be a worse one.”

“Might?” Clarke whispers to herself in disbelief. The winds around them are starting to become noticeable as Clarke breaks out morning rations, finding small comfort in the routine, but Roan still must have heard her over them as he lets out a small half-laugh.

“I’ve told you our lands are hard, Wanheda,” Roan teases, and for some reason Clarke doesn’t hate it this time. She knows what’s bearing down on them, or at least has some small preconception of it, and Roan acting perfectly normal is a small haven.

“Remind me never to doubt you again,” Clarke calls over the rising winds and turns to call her wolves to the sled, seeing Roan reclining against his with a hint of a smile on his lips as if they were on a lovely summer holiday and not about to be chewed up and spat out by a blizzard.

“Would that work?” Roan calls back, and Clarke shakes her head as she whistles her pack over.

“Probably not, but it’s worth a shot to avoid this,” Clarke gestures to the much nearer clouds as the first of her wolves slinks over, apparently liking the concept of riding into the storm even less than Clarke does. 

Roan raises an eyebrow at the storm, regarding it like a petulant child, before shrugging and calling his own team to him. His wolves don’t seem any happier, but both packs do allow their humans to lace them in, and Clarke counts it as a blessing. If the _pakstoka_ had fought the harnesses, getting them settled in might have taken more valuable time than they had. As is, Clarke feels a drop in her stomach as she gets the last wolf attached to the sled and snugs her face mask into place, replacing her gloves. She mounts the sled to find Roan in position on his already, and every fibre of her protests the fact that they’re facing into the storm. The winds are already harsh and flinging snow at them cruelly, and Clarke knows this is only the first whisper of the storm proper.

“Ready?” Roan shouts over the growl of thunder. Clarke simply responds with a grim nod, her jaw clenched, and Roan calls the teams into action.

Clarke has lived through far more in her near-twenty years than she had thought possible. Hurricane level winds and torrential rains, wars, massacres both against and by her people, planning the overthrow of a Queen, and being taken as a political power piece by a King. A million and one experiences in her which proved to her that hell is real, and it exists on Earth. And as the wolves sprint into the teeth of the storm, bearing Clarke and Roan towards the howling and groaning force of nature, Clarke knows she’ll soon have another piece of proof. If they survive the blizzard, that is.

It feels like falling into a nightmare as they breach further into the storm. The thunder ripping through the air punctuates the constant drone of the wind, and it drives rational thought from Clarke’s mind. Gusts drive snow into Clarke’s eyes, and with a quick glance she can see all of her furs thoroughly caked in the powder. She swears she can feel the snow weighing her down, dragging her into the storm, freezing her in place for the ice to take her.

Clarke grips her sled tighter until she feels her joints creak with the force, her only tether to reality in the all consuming violence of nature, and she fixes her gaze on Roan. As long as she can see him, she’s not lost, and they have a chance against the maelstrom of winter. She clings to the solid image of Roan on his sled and to her own stubbornness in the face of the storm and releases one hand from the sled to knock some of the caked snow from her furs. It’s almost immediately replaced, but Clarke feels a million times lighter, and she reminds herself firmly that this is reality, not her nightmare. Although it may be a nightmare, this time she isn’t helpless.

Clarke hunches down further on her sled as a particularly violent gust of wind attempts to tear her from it, lashing the tops of her cheeks and her eyelids with whipping snow. The wolves falter slightly in their cadence before picking up their rapid pace again, and Clarke wills them to be strong enough to carry her and Roan through this. She watches Roan’s team struggle with the same gusts, and for the first time in their journey, Clarke sees Roan hunch forward on his sled to be less of a target for the elements. Clarke had thought she no longer believed in any sort of god, but in that moment, she prays to anyone listening.

If they are listening, the gods certainly do a poor job of showing it by Clarke’s standards. She flinches away from a thunderclap seeming to originate from nowhere in particular, and through the ever growing haze of white, she watches something very large and dark and frighteningly tree shaped fly past them. Although the wolves feet pound the snow as rapidly as ever and Clarke logically knows they’re making progress, in the face of the wind they seem to be holding still. 

Clarke has no idea how long they’ve been in the storm for, how far they’ve gone, or if they’re even headed in the right direction, but Roan’s form is as solid as ever. Clarke’s pride is a thing of the past as she simply prays that he knows, something deep within her entirely confident that he does. These are his lands, after all, and Clarke has seen the love and respect he has for them.

No matter how much Clarke squints, snow seems to find its way into her eyes, and tears freeze on her cheeks from the sting of it on her cheekbones. Clarke tries placing her faith completely in Roan and the wolves by closing her eyes, but another crack of thunder drives them open in a heartbeat. There’s seems to be nothing she can do to fight the snow being driven at her, no way to brace against the winds where she doesn’t feel as if she’s about to be flung into the fury of the storm, and no inch of her that isn’t aching from the cold. Against the storm, Clarke feels like the most fragile filament of a being.

All her anger, and her sense of fairness and right or wrong, what is it in the face of this? Clarke is battered by winds, her thoughts drowned out by thunder, her flesh bitten and clawed at by snow, and all she can do is hold on for her life. And while she is simply trying to survive, Roan is finding them a path, cutting the lead way through the storm, and presumably keeping track of time. Clarke tries to think of any from among her people, or even Trikru or the Boat People, who could manage that, and she’s hardly surprised to come up empty.

Another burst of wind driven snow seems to sneak behind Roan’s pack and single out Clarke’s, and her wolves veer slightly off course in the face of it. Her thoughts - such as they were - are cut off in a spike of panic as the solid sight of Roan is hidden from her by the blizzard. Clarke squints into the snow, but she can’t even see him as a vague shape, and in a heartbeat she feels entirely turned around. She _knows_ he had been just ahead and to her left, but suddenly she finds herself glancing in every direction, and no matter where she looks it’s all the same.

It’s not white, not like snow under the sun, but yellow-gray, dark for moments then flickering with light along with the rumble of thunder. The snow is driven so fast that flakes can’t be seen, but it’s impossible not to see the movement all around. It’s almost like being within a plume of rapidly shifting smoke, if the smoke were made of heavy particles determined to freeze and flay flesh. Clarke can’t see vague shapes of trees anymore, only the wolves in front of her and the snow around her, and she feels it closing in on her. Fear grips her chest tight and pries her eyes open wide, even though snow flies into them and pours tears down her cheeks.

Clarke thinks she calls Roan’s name, her throat certainly feels as if she’s been shouting, but she doesn’t hear it. All she knows is in that one moment she’s entirely alone, and the next her _pakstoka_ are scrambling to a stop next to Roan’s. The sled seems to have popped into existence from nowhere, and Clarke feels the bands of panic snap almost painfully from her chest. In that moment, she could kiss Roan for not being lost in the storm.

Roan leaps from the back of his sled and strides over to Clarke, leaning against the wind, and Clarke dismounts and heads towards him. She can see his lips moving, but even at a few paces away, there’s no sound seeming to emerge from his mouth. Clarke taps her ear through her hood and shakes her head, and Roan frowns but nods as they close the distance between them. They don’t stop a pace apart, Roan places a hand on Clarke’s shoulder and pulls her close enough to him that there’s no wind in the scant space between their bodies.

“We can’t risk losing each other in this!” Roan shouts with his mouth next to Clarke’s ear, and she can still barely hear him, as if he were an echo on a bad comm line. 

Clarke wants to quip ‘No shit’ back at him, but she doesn’t trust her voice to carry, so she simply nods, her forehead brushing against the furs on Roan’s shoulder. The snow caked there doesn’t even melt where her skin touches it, and Clarke suddenly finds herself trying to recall everything she’d ever learned about frostbite and hypothermia. She still feels cold, and her skin still definitely hurts from the cold, so she thinks she’s alright, but she adjusts her improvised scarf around her nose nonetheless. She might not remember everything, but she does remember the pictures of frostbitten toes in unfortunate clarity.

“You get the wolves, I’ll dig us in!” Roan instructs, and Clarke has no idea what “dig us in” means, but when he leans back and looks at her for confirmation that she heard him, Clarke nods again. Get the wolves is simple enough, and Clarke sets all of her mind and body to dispensing that task as quickly as she can.

Clarke had thought she’d been getting good at working with the leather harnesses, but the straps that had been mostly cooperative that morning are stubborn to her touch. She refuses to take off her gloves, no matter how much she knows that will aid with the task, because she knows the voice whispering that she’d actually be less cold if she took the leather gauntlets off is exactly the voice she needs to ignore. It’s a sweet temptation, but barely a whisper at the moment, and Clarke stubbornly sets her jaw and fumbles with the straps more.

The leather is stiff with cold and iced up with snow, but after a painfully long time, the buckles yield to Clarke’s not so gentle ministrations, and one by one, the _pakstoka_ are freed. They slink pathetically at Clarke’s heels, the empty harnesses flailing in the wind as if possessed, and Clarke feels as sorry for them as she does for herself. They may be creatures of winter, but this sort of violence is not what they would run in if they had the choice. When the last of the wolves is threatening to trip Clarke as she moves, she seeks out Roan to see if he needs any help ‘digging in’.

It takes Clarke a fair while to find Roan, actually, never straying out of line of sight of the sleds. It turns out that digging in literally meant _digging_ , and Clarke finds Roan cutting a shelter into the snow, more a shallow tunnel than anything. Desperation to be out of the storm must be a good motivator, or it must have taken Clarke longer than she’d thought to dispense her task, because while the space is small, it’s already larger than she would have thought possible. She watches Roan shovel snow, stamping his feet to compact the powder underneath and then hops down into the hollow, the wolves following her and immediately laying down as close together as they can, on top of each other in many cases. It’s a tight fit, and Clarke has to stoop to walk through it, but within the pit the winds and snow are cut dramatically, and Clarke already feels more secure as she pushes through the wolves to Roan.

“What can I do to help?” Clarke asks, no longer needing to shout over the wind, but still needing to pitch her voice louder than her throat would like. There may be times in which she questions Roan’s decisions, but now is not that time.

“Brings the sleds down.” A short command, and Clarke sprints to complete it, or she would were she on solid ground. In actuality, she stumbles and scrambles across the snow as soon as she extricates herself from the wolves, putting in a great amount of effort for very little gain.

Moving the sleds seemed easy in her mind, but as Clarke digs in her heels and drags the first one forward inch by inch, it proves to be far more difficult. The wind tries to rip the sled from her and to fling her onto her face in the snow, and her grip never seems secure enough on the front of the sled. But Clarke grits her teeth and lets the exertion turn some of her fear into anger at the storm. She builds on that with every hard won step, and soon enough she has the first sled to the dig in. She leaves it just inside the entrance and turns her back on the comfort of the pack to retrieve the other.

The second is harder than the first, and by the time Clarke is halfway to tunnel, her muscles are screaming at her to stop. But Clarke knows they need those supplies, and they need the sled to move quickly enough that the supplies will last. She glares at a gust of wind that makes her shoulder ache, spits an unheard curse when another causes one of her hands to slip from the sled, and keeps pulling until it is parked next to the first.

Task completed, Clarke leaves the entrance and the gusts of wind behind her gladly. Although her muscles ache with exertion, she feels much better the further she gets into the tunnel. Being closed in is nothing new to her, she can’t imagine any child born on the Ark suffering from claustrophobia. Even if she had, Clarke is relatively certain she would have chosen the warmth and relative peace of the enclosed end of the hollow over the blizzard any day.

She finds Roan sitting with his back to one of the walls and a wolf lying with its head in his lap, apparently much less concerned than its brethren because Roan is scratching its ears. Clarke takes a seat of her own near him, joints screaming as she bends them but settling down when she’s no longer standing, and is surprised by how solid the snow feels behind her back. Perhaps Roan had compacted it somehow, or maybe the blizzard had simply driven it that firmly into place. She looks around at the close walls and wonders how it is that being surrounded by so much snow - the very thing they were trying to escape - is going to help them.

“The snow traps the warmth. As long as we keep passage for air, we’ll be fine,” Roan explains without prompting, and Clarke shifts her gaze to him.

“I wasn’t going to ask,” Clarke protests, despite having been curious in the moment before he spoke. Roan simply scoffs.

“Yes, you were.” Roan silences Clarke’s response to that with a raised eyebrow, “Like it or not, I do know you, Clarke.”

Clarke bites back her instinct to remind him that he doesn’t, because she knows she would be in the wrong. Antagonizing Roan just feels so normal that she forgets how much they’ve been through together, even before this trip. Sure, they don’t know each other during times of peace and they have no idea of anything happy in regards to each other, but Clarke doubts the possibility of peace these days. The closest she’s come in a long time is in Otta, and even there she lives with constant fear of assassins.

Clarke lets out a sigh and releases some of her stubbornness with it before responding, “I know.”

“Well what do you know, you can still surprise me,” Roan quips with a dry smile, leaning his head against the wall behind him, “Never thought I’d live to see the day Wanheda would admit she’s wrong.”

“I hate that name.” Clarke grits her teeth against the title everyone seems to love using in reference to her. A wolf slinks up and lays next to her, and she uncurls fists she hadn’t realized she’d formed in order to pet it.

“I know,” Roan replies, needlessly. Of course he knows, how could he not? Clarke’s not exactly been subtle about hiding her distaste for the honorific earned with genocide. But she accepts it, just as she accepts responsibility for the acts which earned it. She knows she has no right to protest being called Wanheda. It’s a painful reminder, like a wound that gets prodded each time someone utters it aloud, and one she desperately needs. “You know there are Azgeda who are ashamed of scars they’ve earned in battle?”

“Why?” Clarke is happy enough with the apparent change of topic.

“They see it as a sign of a time they weren’t good enough.” Roan’s voice calls Clarke back to every time she’s failed, every time she was celebrated as a hero but knew she was the villain because she just wasn’t fast enough, strong enough, smart enough. So maybe the change of topic wasn’t such a change after all. “Of course they’re all idiots. A scar is a scar, they all tell their own stories, and it’s up to the bearer to decide how the tale is told.”

And she’s been doing a shit job of telling hers, is what he doesn’t say out loud. Running away from her people, running away from the name and only using it when it suits her. She takes up the mantle of Wanheda when she needs to, but she’s never really accepted it. She hates that she won it with death, the legends around her and the name scalding her with the memory of rings of fire and of radiation burns. Clarke sets aside the concept of actually embracing Wanheda as more than a disguise, at least for now, and instead asks a question she’d been curious about for a while.

“So all Azgeda scars have meaning?” Clarke thinks of the delicate pattern on Roan’s back, and hers fingers itch with an urge to draw it and to understand the stories in its loops and whirls. An artist’s desire, nothing more.

“Of course. You don’t get to chose a scar, you have to earn it. Each of them tells that tale in its own way. Of course, that’s true of everyone, not just Azgeda. I’m sure even you have scars.”

Clarke looks at her hands, despite them being covered in leather and fur. She knows the small white lines marking them, and she knows the countless others on her body. Nothing as dramatic and intricate as an Azgeda scar piece, but there nonetheless. She can remember a time when she didn’t have any, but it feels almost like that Clarke was an entirely different person. Clarke looks up from her hands at Roan and turns away from thinking of the past.

“What do yours mean?” Clarke asks, and Roan’s free hand reaches up and gently traces one of the scars curving next to his eyes.

“The story of a scar is a very personal thing, Clarke.” Roan’s hand falls to rest on his thigh, and Clarke thinks she might have made a serious faux pas for a moment, but Roan continues, “Mine mark me as royalty, I got them when I won the right to be heir. When I became outcast, they were a mark of my exile, identifying me to anyone who cared to know the news from Otta as unworthy of being Azgeda.”

There’s so much bitterness in his voice, and Clarke feels the urge to do something about it. She watches his hand curl into the furs on the wolf’s neck for a moment, half forming a fist, and Clarke tries to imagine what it would have been like. Being cast out by the people you loved, a mark that had once brought you pride bringing you nothing but their judgement. Clarke wants to say something, but what can she say? What could anyone say about that?

“I’m sorry,” Clarke says, and Roan looks at her in confusion.

“What do you have to be sorry about?”

“It’s just something you say, when things aren’t fair.”

Roan hums thoughtfully at that, “Your people are awfully concerned with fair, aren’t they?”

Clarke thinks about the events that had brought her to this point and she frowns, “Not all of them. They sent me and the original Skaikru, a bunch of kids, to the ground, without supplies and without knowing if we could live down here. The people who made that decision certainly weren’t overly concerned about being fair.”

“Being fair is a luxury that can’t be afforded that often,” Roan says, and it sounds too much like a lecture for Clarke’s liking. 

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try,” Clarke retorts, cool and confident.

“Should you try something doomed to fail?” Roan responds, and Clarke scoffs at that.

“I thought that overthrowing Nia was doomed to fail, yet here we are. Of course you should try.”

Roan turns to face Clarke fully at that, disturbing the wolf in his lap slightly but paying no attention to its shifting as it settles against him again. There’s that intense look on his face again, of him studying Clarke, or something similar to it. Clarke can feel herself being weighed, and she doesn’t where she wants to fall on that scale. But she straightens her back and turns towards him, matching intensity with stubbornness, and Roan frowns slightly.

“Have you thought about your answer?” Roan asks, and this time it’s Clarke’s turn to be confused. He jerks his chin at her and clarifies, “About if you hate Azgeda.”

If Clarke is being honest, she hasn’t thought about it, but somehow she knows the answer to the question this time. She mulls it over for a moment to be sure, the taste of it in her mind unfamiliar, but not necessarily repugnant as she had originally thought it would be.

“No,” She answers shortly, the one word feeling like it carries the weight of a million, and she swears she sees a small smile on Roan’s lips for a moment before he regains his somber composure with a nod.

“Good.” Roan leans back slightly, and some of the intensity of the moment is gone, “You could fit in well here, you know.”

“What if I don’t know how to fit in anymore?” Clarke thinks of her self imposed exile, of being a leader pulled in a million directions, of being sent to Earth, of being a prisoner for trying to help her people. When was the last time she hadn’t been struggling against the people who were supposed to be her home?

“That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try,” Roan parrots Clarke’s earlier words back at her with a smug smile, and she has the intense urge to smack it off his face. Instead, she rolls her eyes, a small smile touching the corners of her mouth. 

The wolf under Clarke’s hand whines, nudging her with its snout, and Roan’s does the same to him. Clarke has a moment of confusion before Roan pats his wolf on its chest soundly and pushes himself to his feet, hunching over in the short tunnel.

“We should feed them before they get too hungry and start snapping. Trust me, that’s not something you want to see.” Roan offers a hand to Clarke, and the wolf next to her yawns as if on cue, displaying its teeth dramatically. Clarke shakes off a shudder that has little to do with the cold and takes Roan’s hand, despite being able to get to her feet on her own.

“I’ll take your word for it,” Clarke remarks, and they half-crawl through the pack to the sleds, sounds of the storm growing louder with their progress.

The side of the sleds facing out into the blizzard have formed a basis for snow drifts of a decent size in the short time Clarke and Roan had been talking, narrowing the entrance significantly. The wind carries the roar of thunder through it nonetheless, and Clarke feels fear crawl through her ribs as they rummage through the packs on Roan’s sled for meat rations. Roan takes one to the wolves and starts feeding the pack lumps of fat and meat, and Clarke follows suit, taking comfort from the routine and from the _pakstoka_. They eat quickly and return to moping, although Clarke sees no few of them actually fall asleep this time.

When the feeding is done, Roan and Clarke return to the back of the tunnel with their own rations. They have no fire to warm them this time, but Roan assures Clarke they’re cooked and can be eaten cold, as unpleasant as they might be that way. Clarke considers gnawing at the frozen meat and vegetable pie, but she doesn’t feel that hungry with the screaming of the storm having touched her again in their brief trip to the entrance, so she tucks it into her furs to hopefully thaw. Roan does the same, and Clarke feels a small glow of pride at having done something that was evidently the right thing to do.

There are a million questions that Clarke wants to ask as she sits next to Roan, questions about Azgeda culture that she had been determined not to understand before. Questions about the land, the people, their history. But none of them feel right with the fury of the storm echoing down to them and the wolves napping and whimpering softly. So she contents herself, for once, with thinking of nothing. Not planning her next move, not fighting some internal battle, simply sitting next to Roan and accepting the solidity of the snow around her and the relative warmth of their burrow. The howl of wind and roar of thunder, backed by the ever present hiss of driven snow, doesn’t exactly allow her to relax, but it’s close to it.

“Tell me something about you,” Roan says, breaking the silence, and Clarke shifts in her seat awkwardly, wondering vaguely where that question had come from.

“What do you want to know?” There’s no point in not telling him about herself. He already knows her in more ways than many others do. He knows how she fights, knows which knife she keeps within reach while she sleeps, knows her nightmares, and seems to know her thoughts on far too frequent occasion. What are facts compared to that?

“What did you do before all this?” Clarke’s brow furrows in confusion, and Roan elaborates, “You keep going on about how kids shouldn’t have to be survivors, what did you do instead?”

“We had classes, where they taught us about the plants of Earth and how to purify water and build fires.” Clarke had always loved those hours spent learning, and they had fallen woefully short of actually preparing anyone. Where was the class in warfare, in Grounder negotiations?

“I’ve seen you build a fire, they must not have been very good classes,” Roan quips, and Clarke swipes some snow at him in good natured retaliation. He smiles and brushes it off of his furs as Clarke continues.

“We would learn about the past, and we’d play silly games, or watch movies.” Clarke remembers game nights with her dad and Wells, and she aches with more than just the exertion of the day. 

“That’s all stuff ‘we’ did. What about you?” Roan specifies, and Clarke is thrown a little bit. She had thought he’d wanted to know about her culture, not about her specifically. Clarke digs idly at the snow next to her with a gloved fingertip and presses her lips together as she thinks.

After a moment, Clarke can only think of one thing, and it echoes hollowly within her similar to the memory of people she’s lost. Not the same scale, not even close, but it’s something lost to her that was always a marker of a good day.

“I drew.” Clarke can taste the longing on her tongue when she says it, and she wonders if Roan notices. How could he not, with everything else he notices about her.

“You could still do that,” Roan states, and Clarke shakes her head, the ache of longing turning into a bitter pit. Art, like everything else, had been stolen from her by the ground.

“Is that really a pastime suitable of an Advisor to the King?” Clarke tries to keep her scorn for the fake official title from her voice, but she knows she doesn’t succeed.

“You’re here because I want you here, Clarke. If anyone has issue with what you do, they can bring it up with me.”

This is the first that Clarke’s heard of that. She had always thought she was there of necessity, that was the agreement. She was nothing but a power piece, right? The idea of being there for some other reason, of Roan seeing actual value in her and not just her legend causes her heart to race, and Clarke pushes that thought away. He must just have misspoken, English isn’t his mother tongue after all. He must have meant need, that would makes sense, and Clarke attaches to that and takes a deep breath.

“I can defend myself,” Clarke responds, instead of questioning Roan’s choice of words. She’s not sure if she wants to know if he misspoke or not, not sure if she’d rather he meant ‘want’ or ‘need’.

“Of course you can.” It’s not patronising in the slightest, a simple acknowledgement of fact. “But I can help you. Even though you don’t _need_ help.”

Clarke purses her lips and digs at the snow again. She wants to reject his help out of hand, a knee jerk reaction, but that’s foolish. The help of a King is a rare thing, and not something to just be thrown away. But she also doesn’t want him to think she’s reliant on him, that she’s not capable on her own. Clarke’s gaze drifts to their sleds, vague shapes past the wolves illuminated by the storm, and she has an idea.

“You’re good with a sword,” Clarke states, and Roan nods slowly in response, “Teach me.”

Roan measures Clarke with his gaze again, and Clarke stares right back. If he wants to help her, she’ll let him, but on her terms. And right now, all she needs help with is swinging the sword he’d given her. She’s sure she could figure it out on her own, or from another warrior, but she’d seen Roan fight and she knows she ought to be his equal if she’s going to keep being at his side. Even if she’s just a trophy, some still might try to take her, and she wants to be ready. She doesn’t want to be nervous like she was in that village.

“When we get back to Otta, then,” Roan agrees to Clarke’s request, such as it was. “I won’t be an easy teacher, though.”

“Worse than the wild cats?” Clarke asks, sarcasm in her voice evident doubt of how hard a teacher Roan could be. Roan smiles and nods.

“Much worse.”

“Worse than the snowfall?” Clarke gestures to the entrance to their tunnel, and Roan scoffs, his smile growing and drawing a grin out of Clarke.

“Definitely. You said you didn’t hate me, last night, but that might change.” Roan raises an eyebrow at Clarke, almost challenging her, and she shrugs.

“Maybe. But I’ll be learning how to swing a sword, so I could kill you if I get to hate you too much.” Clarke smiles with the words, bickering playfully with Roan and enjoying herself despite the ferocious sounds coming from outside.

“Careful now, that could be considered treason.” Roan’s tone is more teasing than actually warning, and Clarke is glad he didn’t take it seriously. For all that they’re trapped in a storm and returning from a diplomatic mission that involved a fight to the death, this trip seems almost like a break from everything real. Maybe it’s the storm cutting them off from it all, but Clarke thinks that Roan is enjoying just being Roan, rather than King, as much as she’s enjoying not being Wanheda.

“I thought I wasn’t one of your subjects. You have to be a subject to commit treason, if I’m not mistaken.”

Roan hums thoughtfully at that, and pulls his pie from his furs to munch on before making his response. Clarke follows his suit, still not hungry, but knowing she needs to eat, especially in the cold. After a few bites, Roan regards his pie thoughtfully, and his expression is carefully neutral when he speaks. 

“You could be, if you wanted.” Roan’s voice is devoid of emotion, but not monotone. It’s almost casual as if he were commenting on the state of a road, not making Clarke an actual offer of joining his people.

Clarke files that away to be thought of later. Right now, with cold pie proving to be just as unappetizing as Roan had promised, she’s not ready to make a decision or indicate one to Roan. Hell, she’d only just accepted that she doesn’t hate the Azgeda, she certainly can’t decide if she wants to be Azgeda or not. Maybe, though. Something to process another day, a day where she’s not trapped in a storm and sitting almost shoulder to shoulder with Roan.

So Clarke keeps her tone light as she responds, and presses for some information that might help her, the day she wants to decide, “Would I get a scar?”

“Do you think it would be a story worth telling?” Roan seems to be content with her non answer, and his response is no longer diplomatically cool, back to lighthearted contentment in his tone.

“Skaikru leader leaves the Skaikru, overthrows royalty, forms an alliance with royalty, joins the Azgeda. No, sounds pretty boring to me.” Clarke stretches, and in moving notices how sore she is, and exactly how cold ‘relatively warm’ actually is. She hadn’t noticed it while sitting still, but when her furs shift on her skin, they carry patches of cold air and she shivers slightly. “Will it get any warmer?”

Roan gives Clarke a look that says _Did you really just ask me if it would get warmer during a blizzard?_ as well as words, and she shakes her head.

“No, I mean, with all of us down here, won’t it warm up?” Clarke pats one of the wolves, who doesn’t even stir in its slumber.

“The snow keeps it warmer than out there, but it won’t get hot enough to melt the snow.” Roan raises an eyebrow at Clarke, “Getting cold?”

“You can’t claim you’re not. Even Azgeda have to feel the cold,” Clarke retorts.

“You learn to ignore it,” Roan replies with a shrug.

“What a horrible lesson,” Clarke deadpans as she shifts her legs and realizes how cold her thighs and butt have gotten from the snow. The only part of her that’s not that cold is her right shoulder, where it’s almost touching Roan.

“I could keep you warm.” Roan suggest, his tone and expression entirely serious, and Clarke regards him suspiciously. 

“I can keep myself warm.” She rejects the offer out of hand and sharply, remembering how certain members of the delinquents used to ‘keep each other warm’ at night, and Roan sighs sharply.

“So proud you’re willing to freeze, of course,” Roan’s tone is bitter, and Clarke finds that it’s not as pleasant as when she would goad him into a bad mood previously. She actually feels a little bad for the fact that he’s no longer smiling because of her reaction. And she is really cold.

Clarke mulls it over for a moment, as Roan finishes his pie leisurely, frowning slightly at the pastry. She recalls how warm and comfortable she had been that morning, waking up in Roan’s arms with the wolves around them. It would purely be to share body heat, right? His mass is much greater than that of a wolf, it only makes sense to share heat with him in a blizzard. Especially if the alternative is the blackened skin and amputations of frostbite.

Clarke swallows her pride and smothers memories of the delinquents, reminding herself Roan is a King and has never shown any interest in her that way.

“Roan,” Clarke says, and Roan looks up at her, an inquisitive eyebrow raised, “It is really cold, and I’d rather not freeze.”

She’s not going to say ‘Please cuddle me to keep me warm’, but apparently what Clarke does say is enough, because Roan shows a hint of a smile again and crosses his legs on the snow in front of him. In the most incredibly awkward few seconds of Clarke’s life, she settles herself in his lap and tries not to think of how intimate the pose is. It doesn’t take long, though, before heat begins to seep through her furs where before it had been the cold of snow, and Clarke is helpless in the face of that. She actually relaxes and leans back against Roan’s chest, feeling warm enough that the position is no longer embarrassing to her.

“Better?” Clarke can hear the smug grin in his voice, and she rolls her eyes.

“I will feed you to the _pakstoka,_ ” Clarke warns, but she can’t deny that she feels better already, and she’s certain Roan knows that. 

“Treason,” Roan chides, his chest rumbling against Clarke’s back.

“Not your subject,” she reminds him, and she can feel his laugh.

Clarke isn’t certain of the passage of time in the void of the blizzard, but Roan prompts her to get up before too long, and they feed the wolves again. He seems to be keeping track of time, or is at least very convincing and confident in keeping up that image. After they feed the wolves, they resume their previous position, and Roan teaches Clarke about weapons. Each time they feed the wolves, they switch topics to discuss and which of them is doing most of the talking. It keeps Clarke’s mind from the blizzard, and she thinks it keeps Roan from thinking of whatever might be waiting for him in Otta. The business of a King never stops, even when that King is trapped in a storm.

When they lay down to sleep among the dozing wolf pack, Roan lays behind Clarke and wraps his arms around her middle. Part of her wants to protest, but most of her wants to tuck her hands between his arms and her stomach to warm up, so she does that instead. When she falls asleep, it’s to the distant howling of wind, and the far more present breathing of wolves and Roan.

Clarke’s dream is vivid as a nightmare when it pulls her in, and the snow she’s surrounded by is soaked a scalding red. She swallows nervously and scans the field. Will it be all the Skaikru she sees dying this time? Just the delinquents? Just her family? She’s uncertain, and the longer she looks and finds nothing, the more she’s afraid. A cough sounds in her dreamscape, and she hunts for the source.

“Clarke,” a familiar, masculine voice rumbles from the distance, and she runs towards it. She gets a brief glimpse of dark clothing, a figure with broad shoulders hunched over and painting the snow with blood, and then the voice calls her again.

This time, Clarke wakes with a gasp, panic wrapping tight around her. It takes a moment for her to realise that it’s not just panic holding her, something else is, and a heartbeat of struggling to remember it’s Roan. She stills herself in his arms and takes a few deep breaths, feeling his grip on her loosen as she calms down.

“Sorry,” Clarke whispers, and Roan mumbles something that might have been a very sleepy ‘It’s okay’ into the back of her hood.

“Go back t’sleep.” Clarke can feel the words rumble in Roan’s chest, and she takes comfort from his proximity and attempts to calm her racing heart. It takes time, and Roan is lightly snoring by the time she does, but Clarke eventually manages to nod off again.

The remainder of Clarke’s dreams are inconsequential enough to fade in the moment she wakes, with Roan’s hand shaking her shoulder. Clarke quells her instinct to grab a weapon on being woken by another’s touch, settling for pushing herself into a sitting position instead. Roan kneels next to her and gestures to the entrance of their tunnel.

“Listen,” he says, and Clarke turns her attention to the outside world.

She tries to listen to whatever Roan is indicating, but either her hearing isn't that good or there’s nothing to hear. It’s silent, save for the sounds of the wolves gradually waking up in the faint light of early morning creeping in through the entrance. It takes a moment for Clarke to realize, and then she can’t help but smile.

“Nothing,” she turns to Roan, and he nods. The storm had cleared out while they slept.

“We’d better get moving, there’s a lot of ground to cover between here and Otta.” There’s something different in Roan’s voice as he half crawls through the pack to the sleds and sets to clearing enough snow to pull them out. He sounds more serious than he had the night before as they’d talked about inconsequential things, more Kingly and more like Roan when Clarke had first met him.

Clarke tries to shake off the feeling as she joins him in clearing out their sleds, but she can’t help but feel a little sad over the change. While the blizzard had been terrifying, at least it had freed them of all but their most pressing concerns, like food and staying warm. She supposes she can sympathize with him. She doesn’t even have any real responsibilities waiting for her in Otta, but as Clarke steps into the blindingly bright snow, she feels the weight of going back creeping up on her. There’s always people watching there, never more than a moment in which either of them can truly be themselves.

Clarke finds herself hoping, as they feed and harness up their wolves, that her and Roan can find a few moments after returning. She supposes, for all her temporary physical suffering this trip, that it has been enlightening and not all terrible. She smiles at Roan as they mount up, and he returns it. She hardly sees the King of Azgeda smile in Otta, and she would like to see it more.

Clarke determinedly does not think too much about that during the rest of their trip, and when they swap the wolves for their horses, she tries not to tear up as Roan says goodbye to each of them like a friend and she does they same. She blames it on the snow, of course, there’s much more of it since the proper snowfall moved through and it’s blinding in the sun. They ride their horses back to Otta, and Roan leaves Clarke with the reins to his as he’s immediately rushed away on urgent business.

A bitter emotion bites at Clarke at that, and she distracts herself from it by cleaning both of their mounts. She had known Roan would be needed as soon as they got back, and she had thought she was fine with it. As she brushes Roan’s horse thoroughly, she decides she’s only upset because he’d handed her his reins like she was an errand girl. Never mind that she knows he cares for his horse as much as Clarke cares for Nieve and handing her his reins likely means he trusts her. 

Clarke finds food and a hot bath, and makes her way back to her chambers after both have turned her back into a person from a popsicle. There’s charcoal and parchment that she hadn’t had on her desk when she’d left, and Clarke contemplates it for a moment. She absently rubs the tips of the fingers on her right hand together as she thinks of the Azgeda scars she’s seen, and then she adamantly turns away to deal with unpacking the leather bundles sitting at the foot of her bed. Not today, she decides, but she doesn’t get rid of the drawing supplies. Maybe later.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyyyyy guys, how's it going? So I am a massive procrastinator who took way too long on this chapter, and I'm sorry, but it's probably going to be even longer before the next chapter because I'm moving countries again in just over a month and I've gotta start working on getting that sorted soon, I suppose. But this chapter has some really sappy character development stuff, so that's worth it, right?
> 
> Anyway, enough apologising! This is my first attempt at writing slow burn, so you all really should send some love to [Etra](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) for being the best beta and catching pacing errors (Also for editing this in a few hours after I sent it to her, she's amazing y'all) 
> 
> If you want to yell at me for being a lazy ass, feel free to on [my tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) And so many thanks to all of you who leave comments, kudos, and who read and stick with it. Trust me, I will be finishing this story, even if it takes me a year to do so <3


	5. Chapter 5

“Shit!” The curse flies unbidden from Clarke as Roan’s sword swings into her unprotected side, connecting with a pre-existing bruise in a move that she knows is in no way incidental. She’s thankful that the practice blades they’re using are weighted wood, rather than steel, but it still hurts like hell when Roan hits her. Which is a lot.

“Again.” Roan jerks his chin at Clarke as she takes a moment to try and breathe through the pain. He hasn’t even broken a sweat, and Clarke wants to make him suffer for that. “You should be better than this by now.”

Now Clarke _definitely_ wants to hurt him. She clenches her jaw, swallows down her pain, and raises her blade again, looking for an opening in Roan’s seemingly relaxed pose. Of course, before she’s even had a chance to think about attacking, he swings his blade at her, and Clarke is forced onto the defensive. She blocks his attacks, which is a vast improvement over their first few lessons, but she knows with each step she’s being forced farther backwards, losing more and more ground in the battle.

Clarke tries to look for patterns in his attacks, but only barely manages to block or sidestep the swings, never gaining enough time to launch a counterattack of her own. Her dodges come closer and closer to failing as she falls back, and she can feel the threat of being backed against a wall looming behind her. If she hits the wall, she knows she’s “dead”, and while that hurts less than the beating of the lessons, her pride makes it seem far worse. She would rather Roan’s sword beating new bruises into her flesh than the disappointed look he gives her when he walks away from her surrender.

The corner of Roan’s mouth pulls down into an almost imperceptible frown, and Clarke knows the dimensions of his training ring well enough to know their match is over. Her teeth grind together in anger, at Roan and at herself for still not being good enough, and she gets one last thrill of energy, a cough of fumes to a dying engine. Throwing caution to the wind, Clarke throws herself to the side, a last ditch attempt to roll out of the line of attack and launch her own.

It would have been so impressive, had Roan’s blade not thwacked her solidly between the shoulders as she tucked into her roll, turning it from a dodge into a face first fall into the dirt. It takes a shamefully long moment for Clarke’s brain to catch up to what just happened, and she spits blood and grit from her mouth as she flips over onto her back with a suppressed groan. She hurts all over and is so full of impotent rage she could cry. She wants to be better, needs to be better, and she still fails every time she tries.

Clarke looks up at Roan, his expression entirely bored, and feels the all too familiar weight of the point of his blade resting against her throat. She spreads her hands next to her head, releasing her sword in a sign of surrender. Boredom shifts to borderline disgust on Roan’s features as he removes his sword and takes a small step back. He makes no move to help her to her feet.

“What should I have done differently?” Clarke chokes the words out against her pride. As much as she hurts, she knows he’s only trying to teach her. She tries to remind herself of that, after their training sessions when she’s soaking her multitude of bruises in the hot springs within the castle. She bites back another pained groan as she awkwardly pushes herself to her knees, standing not quite an option for her yet.

“Tried harder,” Roan says, and Clarke clenches a fist in the dirt. 

Try harder? She’s the one who went from a life where fighting wasn’t even a concept, to being a criminal, to just trying to survive. He has no idea how hard she tries, all the time, and she trembles with anger at him. 

“I’m trying my hardest,” Clarke grits through her teeth, staring at the dirt below her and trying desperately to cling to that anger. Her eyes burn, and the line between tears of anger and those of shame and despair is perilously thin.

“No, you’re not.” Roan’s voice is cool and hard, and Clarke hates him for it. She whips her head up to glare at him and meets his impassive gaze. “If you were, I’d be the one on the ground. Get up, try again.”

There are a million curses brewing in Clarke, both English and Azgedasleng, and it would be so easy to bark them out to fuel the rage which seems to be the only thing keeping her going. Instead, Clarke takes one deep breath, focusing on the smell of the sweat touched dirt and the metallic whiff of blood in her nose. With screaming muscles, she pushes herself to her feet and grips her sword again, no matter how much her hand hates the rough wrapping on the hilt and the way the blade constantly pulls towards the ground.

“Again, then,” Clarke spits, and she knows she must look like a petulant child to Roan, but she feels like a feral animal and she’s going to make him pay for every bruise on her body. Which, if the aching is any indicator, is a hell of a lot.

Roan doesn’t nod or say anything to indicate his attack, and Clarke is ready for it this time. She knows his attacks in that moment, and even with her clumsy muscles, she dodges to the side. His blade brushes her but it doesn’t impact, and her arms don’t end up aching with the effort of blocking the strike. She takes a step into his swing, raising her sword, and is unsurprised when he steps back to avoid her counter. She’d been hoping for that, and rushes forward to hook her right foot behind his retreating left. It’s a dirty trick, but one that somehow works, and Roan goes tumbling backwards into the dirt.

Clarke falls with him, her muscles too exhausted and abused to react quickly enough to free her leg. She doesn’t care though, because as she crashes down on his chest and hears the air leaving his lungs as his back hits the floor, she’s finally won. Sure, maybe she didn’t win by other’s standards, but she knocked down the King of Azgeda and she’s damn proud. Pride lasts for about one full second before the pain returns, and Clarke groans weakly against Roan’s chest as he gasps in fresh air. All her emotions, shame and anger and soul wrenching failure, leave in the face of her physical agony.

“I’m dead,” she complains. Every strike she’s received is multiplied by the exhaustion of the fights, and now her ankle is very definitely not pleased with her brilliant move. She tries to move and finds that too monumental a task for the moment, and she’s not entirely shocked. She’d known when she had pushed herself to her feet that if she’d had to fight through more than a few exchanges, she would have collapsed. Her body is tough, but not that tough, evidently.

“As am I, it seems,” Roan groans as he shifts, and then he taps Clarke’s head, “Glad to see you finally started using your weapon.”

“You could have just told me to think, rather than beating it into me,” Clarke retorts, attempting movement once again and this time managing to slowly and shakily roll off of Roan’s chest. She lays next to him and considers just taking a nap for a few years right there as Roan pushes himself to his feet with unfair ease.

“Would that have worked?” Roan quips, and Clarke snorts as she remembers the blizzard.

“No, but it’s worth a try to avoid this,” she gestures to herself weakly, and groans in pain at even that small motion. Roan chuckles and extends a hand to her, which Clarke considers ignoring. It only takes her a moment to weigh the decision and she takes his hand with a sigh, allowing him to help her to her feet with no small amount of pained exclamations and grunts.

“So, me, the cats, and snowfall, which it the worst teacher?” Roan holds Clarke’s hand a moment longer than strictly necessary as she regains her feet, and she misses the steadying touch when he releases her. She stretches slightly and shakes her head.

“I’d choose a blizzard of cats over you any day.”

“Good.” Roan nods, entirely straight faced, “You can dream of that tonight, and we’ll be back to training tomorrow.”

“I hate you,” Clarke complains, following Roan out of the training room and into the blessedly empty halls. No one needs to see Wanheda covered in dirt and she’s sure no small amount of blood. 

“Are you going to make good on your threat to kill me?” Roan asks, looking half over his shoulder at Clarke limping behind him.

“If I could raise my sword I’d run you through.” Clarke bites back a curse from the end of her unintimidating threat as she stumbles slightly and comes down on the ankle she’d used to trip Roan.

It must be more hurt than she thought, because it fails to quite take all of her weight, and the world stops the way that it does when you’re about to fall and your body knows there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it. One heartbeat of frozen dread in which Clarke knows that she’s about to meet the floor quite intimately, and then the world kicks back into startling speed as she collapses. She reaches out in front of her in vain for something to hold onto in the barren hallway, and prays that her arms hold her weight and prevent her from concussing herself. 

She never has to find out if her work exhausted limbs could have held her, because with the reactions of a master swordsman, Roan is at Clarke’s side in the moment after she stumbles. He catches her by the arm and her searching grasp finds his arms in turn, and Clarke remains mostly upright. It takes a moment for her to remember how to breathe, and then another moment to regain her footing and calm her heart rate enough to reluctantly let go of Roan. He holds her elbow for a moment longer, studying her until she gives him a nod that she’s not about to topple over, and then he releases her.

“Your ankle?” Roan inquires, and Clarke nods with a grimace, testing her weight more carefully on the offending joint.

“I don’t think it appreciates the lesson I learned.” Clarke takes a few limping steps under Roan’s watchful eye, evaluating the joint and finding no more concern than it being royally painful. A bad bruise at the worst, if she’s any judge of her own body.

“You’ll find Azgeda are a fan of pain as a teaching method,” Roan remarks dryly, Clarke rolls her eyes. 

“I hadn’t noticed,” Clarke responds with heavy sarcasm, and limps slowly down the hall as Roan takes a few large strides to catch up, walking next to her when he does.

“However,” Roan continues, “the lessons has already been learned. There’s no reason to suffer after the fact, so long as you’re not the forgetful type.”

“I can guarantee you I’ll remember this.” Clarke grimaces, frustrated by their slow pace and the distance to her chambers, but unwilling to press the issue with her ankle.

“Good.” Roan nods, “Then I have something that can help you.”

“What is it?” Clarke eyes him skeptically as they pass the branching hallway she would have used to get to her room, instead following the much longer route that leads to Roan’s. Part of her aches for her own bed, but more of her aches for whatever sort of Azgeda painkiller Roan might have.

“No idea.” Roan shrugs, “But it works and is very expensive. Also not something a King is supposed to have.”

Roan regards her carefully at that and Clarke lets out a huff of air halfway to a laugh, “A King is supposed to just suffer through pain, I guess? Well, what’s another secret between us, I wouldn’t want to cause more drama in your court than I do just by existing.”

“You know, if you ever visited the court, you may find people don’t find you as outlandish as you think.”

Clarke shakes her head at that, “I’m Skaikru. They’re Azgeda. I doubt there’s a lot of common ground there.”

“I’m Azgeda,” Roan reminds her, and Clarke groans. She considers walking off - her brain doesn’t need to be as exhausted with questions of morals and distinctions as her body is - but they’re almost to Roan’s chambers and she really _needs_ that painkiller now.

And perhaps, a part of her suggests, the distinctions she had been clinging to between her ideals as Skaikru and the lifestyle of the Azgeda aren’t nearly as important as she had once thought. When not fighting against the culture every waking moment, Clarke actually finds it a lot less abhorrent. Sure, it’s harsh, but… Clarke looks up at Roan, who glances at her ankle with a frown. The pain had been to teach her, but he clearly takes no glee in it. Perhaps that had been her misunderstanding when coming to Otta, mistaking necessity for desire.

“No witty reply?” Roan teases as he opens the door to his room, and Clarke limps past him.

“I’ll work on that, you work on my ankle,” she quips, making a beeline for the closest seat to her and sitting with a wince as she takes the weight off of her ankle.

“As you command,” Roan mutters sarcastically, and Clarke can’t help but smile a little. Like the culture he leads and embodies, Roan is a lot easier to get along with outside of fights.

As Roan rummages through a chest in the corner of his room, Clarke tries to convince herself to recall her lesson, to pick it over in minute detail and learn every iota of information she can. But with the ever insistent throbbing in her ankle, she can’t quite bring herself to, so she studies Roan instead. She would study his room, but save for the papers on his desk being different and his bed being in a new state of disarray, it doesn’t appear to have changed since last time she was here.

Roan moves as if he hadn’t just worked out for the better part of an hour, the only sign of exertion being more prominent veins on his forearms and the fact that he’s wearing a sleeveless top rather than a full fur coat. Clarke wonders if she’ll ever reach that point, and she finds herself admiring and desiring that endurance. Sure, a life where fighting is a necessity isn’t what she wanted, but her time with the Azgeda has proven to her that it’s what she must live. If she must fight, she wants to be able to do it well, rather than tiring after the first minutes.

As Roan places aside leathers and furs in his search, the edges of his extensive back scar peek from beneath his shirt. A symmetrical design reminiscent of wings, if Clarke recalls correctly, and she wishes she could remember it better. She hadn’t exactly been paying close attention to the scar at the time, but a design like that was hard to forget entirely. She’s sure the story behind it would be equally as difficult to forget, and she wants to know it, but at the same time she knows enough that she shouldn’t ask. That story is Roan’s and Roan’s alone, if he wants to tell her, he will.

Clarke’s mind wanders, forming half theories for Roan’s scar and jumping from that topic to her own scars. She’s done things that haven’t left a mark on her skin, yet are imprinted in her soul. If she were to show the world herself pulling the lever in Mount Weather or burning Trikru warriors alive, how would she draw that? Designs vaguely tease at her and Clarke’s hand yearns for a stick of charcoal. She thinks that perhaps, if her pain allows, she might actually make use of the paper in her room. Not that she wants to earn a scar, which would falsely mark her as Azgeda, but merely to pursue the thought process. There’s no harm in imagining it, after all.

“Here we go.” Roan’s voice rumbles, drawing Clarke from her thoughts as he stands, a small dusty jar in one hand and a faded linen bandage in the other. He grabs a chair and carries it with him as he crosses the room, placing it closely facing Clarke.

Roan sits and pats his thigh, raising an eyebrow at Clarke as she frowns in confusion. “I need to see your ankle if I’m going to treat it.”

“Oh, right, sorry.” Clarke flushes slightly with embarrassment and hurries to remove her shoe and sock, a task made more difficult given the swelling and pain. With gritted teeth, she manages to bare her ankle, and she lifts her leg and places her heel gingerly on Roan’s leg.

Roan frowns slightly as he takes in the sight of her ankle; half again its normal size and already beginning to bruise. Clarke winces at the knowledge of how badly she’s hurt herself and the time it will take to recover, far worse than any of the bruises she’s taken in training thus far. Those were merely annoying and sore, this injury makes Clarke grateful for the luxuries of the court. Had she hindered her ability to walk somewhere where she needed to provide her own food and means of survival, it could have been catastrophic.

Roan unscrews the lid of the jar and Clarke peers at the contents curiously. An innocent enough looking balm, a pale white thick cream giving off the scent of lavender and mint and something else Clarke can’t identify. Given its innocuous appearance and almost appetizing scent, Clarke is skeptical of how well it will work, but she doesn’t raise any of her reservations to Roan as he scoops up a small amount of the substance and applies it to her skin.

The first touch to her inflamed joint hurts, and it aches whenever Roan touches a new area, massaging it gently into her skin. But everywhere that he’s already treated is swiftly soothed, a cool tingle working down into her nerves and calming the pulsing pain. Roan works quickly and uses barely enough cream to cover the entirety of her injured ankle, and soon enough Clarke breathes a heavy sigh of relief. 

“Feel better?” Roan continues to massage Clarke ankle, despite the painkiller having taken effect already. Perhaps it has an anti-inflammatory property as well, and he’s attempting to work it into her joint, or he’s making sure he’s covering all her injury. Regardless, Clarke isn’t going to complain now that the pressure actually feel soothing, rather than torturous.

“Yes, thank you,” Clarke responds, her thanks heartfelt. “I can see why Azgeda wouldn’t approve of this.”

“It goes against many of our traditions, to turn away pain and suffering. We’re supposed to simply learn to overcome them.”

“And if you don’t?” Clarke asks, as Roan caps the jar and places it aside, picking up the bandage.

“We die.”

Clarke hums softly in understanding, the Azgeda concept of ‘strength or death’ not nearly so foreign to her mind any more. It’s still harsh, of course, but the world is harder. She had become harder since the Ark, and she hadn’t even been raised here. Would she have ever thought the Azgeda were too cruel, had she been born among the kru? Clarke sees more and more as she spends time among them that they have their reasons to be as they are, just as she had her reasons for everything she did for her people.

Roan’s movements are deft and sure as he begins to bind her ankle, applying just enough pressure to support, but not constrict. Clarke wonders how many times he’s had to bandage injuries, and when he became so stubborn that he could just ignore pain. She knows she should shy away from that concept - for surely there is no shame in pain and expressions of it - but for some reason, she wants to get to that point. Although her ideal would be a life in which she didn’t have to endure such suffering, being able to cauterize her own wounds without flinching has a certain appeal.

Roan ties off the bandage and inspects his work, nodding once before leaning back. He doesn’t move Clarke’s foot from its resting point on his thigh, and although the balm is already starting to work and numb the pain, she makes no move to either. She leans back into the comfortable embrace of the chair, mirroring Roan’s relaxed pose, only made slightly awkward by her elevated foot.

“Don’t go ruining my work, understand?” Roan regards Clarke critically, and she lets out a half scoff.

“I don’t plan on it.” Clarke flexes her toes, marvelling at the immediacy and totality of the pain relief. She might actually have to be careful, if she’s not she could easily strain the still injured joint by assuming the painkiller made it whole again. “Where did you get this stuff, anyway?” 

“Trishanakru. They’re soft,” Roan’s voice doesn’t carry any judgement with the commonly scornful term, simply a statement of fact. “And kind. When I was banished, I encountered a southern storm I was prepared for. It washed a mountain trail from beneath me, sent me tumbling right into one of their glowing groves. I almost died.”

Roan says it with little emotion, as if telling her about the stores of firewood in the castle, but he pauses a moment to clear his throat before continuing, and Clarke wonders if some memories still plague him. Of his unpreparedness, his self-perceived failure, or simply the reminder of his own mortality. 

“One of Trishanakru found me, and he took me in. His family nursed me back to health, despite the fact that I threatened them and cursed them the whole time.” A small smile ghosts at the edges of Roan’s mouth. “They told me I could kill them when I could walk again, and not a minute sooner.”

“You didn’t...” Clarke doesn’t believe Roan would have made good on his threats, but she didn’t know him in the early days of his banishment. He could have been a different man back then, could have made terrible decisions.

“Of course not. I was humiliated and in pain, I wanted them to fear me so they wouldn’t pity me. I don’t think that ploy ever worked, though. They continued being unfailingly nice, and I left as soon as I could move. Tried to steal away in the middle of the night, but their kid caught me and gave me the balm, said it would make running away easier.” Roan stares into the distance for a moment before chuckling, “Cute kid, she was right.”

“Did you ever go back?” Clarke asks.

Roan’s brow furrows and he looks at Clarke with confusion written plain across his face, “Why would I have?”

“To thank them.” At Roan’s continued confused look, Clarke elaborates, “For saving you?”

“I never asked them to save me.” Roan says matter of factly, and Clarke sighs. There’s that Azgeda pride, never say please, never say thank you, if someone offers you something it is yours to take without compunction. On one hand, Clarke can understand. What could he have offered them, anyway, a penniless Prince of the run? The longer he was with them, the more risk he likely brought. But on the other hand, he could have done something. Clarke wants to believe she would have at least not left in the middle of the night without saying anything.

“I suppose, it’s just… Skaikru would have thanked them.” Clarke tries to explain.

“Every Skaikru would?” Roan asks, tone heavy with skepticism. Clarke wants to say yes, but she thinks of the people she’d dropped to the ground with; Murphy, Mbege, Dax, Roma, and countless others like them.

“No, but most of them would.” Roan smirks slightly at that and it’s Clarke’s turn to be confused, until he comments.

“‘Them’?”

“Us.” Clarke corrects herself, rolling her eyes at Roan. It had been a simple misspeak, no need for him to look like the cat that got the cream. And even if it hadn’t, why would he be so pleased at Clarke thinking herself apart from Skaikru?

“Of course. And now,” Roan sighs, placing aside Clarke’s foot gently and pushing himself to his feet as if the simple task were a monumental chore, “I have to prepare for council.”

“Oh, of course.” Clarke stands in a hurry and nods at Roan cordially, before turning to leave his chambers. She hardly limps at all, a testament to whatever Roan had given her.

“You know,” Roan’s voice halts Clarke short of his door, “there’s a seat for you there. In the council chamber.”

“No Azgeda would want to see me sit in it.” Clarke hesitates by the door, despite her vague rejection of the implied offer.

“Do you really care what the Azgeda think of you?” Roan asks, and Clarke frowns at the question. Of course she didn’t, or at least, she had thought she didn’t. But now, perhaps… Perhaps there is some validity to their opinions, and that might influence Clarke’s desire for the good opinion of her. 

“Also,” Roan continues after a moment, “there is at least one Azgeda who wishes to see you take your place as advisor. And since I’m the King, I believe my wishes may overrule those of even my council.”

“You want my advice?” Clarke turns back to look at Roan in shock, and his expression is carefully neutral.

“I believe that both me and my people _need_ your advice.” A slight frown sneaks onto his features. “This winter is… hard. Things may need to change before we see its end, and change is not easy for us.”

Clarke holds Roan’s gaze as she determines her answer, trying to read the situation in his eyes. She might make things worse by taking her political role, might make herself more than a few enemies within Roan’s court. But she also may be able to save the suffering of some of the Azgeda, and she can’t pretend to wish them all ill. She feels her decision snap into place in her mind, like a piece in a puzzle, satisfying and absolutely right.

“I’ll see you in court,” Clarke states, and Roan’s shoulders relax slightly from a tension Clarke hadn’t even noticed.

“Advisor.” Roan nods a dismissal.

“King Roan.” Clarke echoes the motion, and turns, leaving his chambers to head for her own. She’ll need to be less sweaty, bloody, and generally filthy if she wants to make a somewhat decent impression on the other advisors.

It turns out, in the end, that her attempts to impress the other advisors were wasted effort entirely. She probably could have showed up entirely naked and been paid no more attention to, and felt no less embarrassed. Every person present in the chamber, from the 15 year old boy who was Roan’s advisor to the state of Otta, to the withered old warrior that advised him on the state of his armies, completely ignored Clarke as if she were no more important than one of the servants hovering around the table with refreshments.

Every word spoken was Azgedasleng, rattled off quickly in disparate accents and dialects, new words breaking any semblance of understanding Clarke may have had. She tried to follow screaming matches and deadly quiet arguments as best as she could, but the words failed to register properly in her mind. By the time the meeting breaks, on Roan rough dismissal which was all he seemed to do other than calling the meeting to order, Clarke feels entirely like a child wandering into Farm station and trying to understand the Cantonese drifting through the air. She couldn’t form an opinion on any of the topics, let alone advise on them, and as the other advisors leave the room, she remains in her seat, swallowing the quiet shame of feeling entirely out of her element and _unimportant_.

After a while, Clarke is left alone in the room with Roan, and she stolidly doesn't look at him. How is she supposed to meet his gaze, which she can feel upon her, when she so soundly proved unworthy of the vote of confidence he had given her in inviting her to his council? Instead she balls her hands into fists on her thighs and watches the skin stretch over her knuckles, trying to recall anything she might have managed to pick up on in the course of the meeting.

The scrape of wood on stone draws her from the futile task, and Clarke looks up as Roan stands and walks towards her almost leisurely. He stops a short distance away and regards Clarke expectantly.

“What did you learn?” Roan asks, and Clarke chokes out a self deprecating laugh.

“That I don’t know as much Azgedasleng as I thought I did.”

Roan nods as if he’d fully expected that response, “It’ll come with time.”

“And until it does?”

“We meet at the same time every day. I expect my council to be full from now on.” Roan challenges Clarke with his gaze, and no matter how much she never wants to feel that out of her depth again, she raises her chin and rises to the occasion.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Clarke states soundly as she pushes her chair back and stands. A small smile twists the corners of Roan’s mouth, and Clarke finds comfort in it. She nods to him and turns, stalking out of the room.

-

It takes several meetings before Clarke is able to clumsily follow the conversations of the advisors, and Clarke doesn’t even try to contribute. No matter how much she might like to join the advisors in shouting her opinion, she knows it is smarter to simply listen. She learns the individual advisor’s standpoints, the common topics of contention, and the way the sessions proceed. 

After the sessions, if Clarke has noticed some small fact she thinks Roan may not have heard in the bedlam the meetings invariably become, she seeks him out to inform him. Usually he’s noticed it, but he asks her opinions and trains her mind similar to how he trains her body with the sword. She adapts to politics quickly, but the mental checking and calculating is just as difficult as swinging a sword had been, at first.

She finds, as the days pass in a blur of mental and physical exhaustion, that there is at least one upside to running between training sessions and council meetings and her self-imposed missions to mingle with the court. When she sleeps at the end of it all, most of the time she’s too tired to have nightmares. Even as her body begins to adapt to the strain of her new schedule, she has the terrible dreams less and less. She chalks it up to distance between herself and the traumas that had cause them, and finds a dry humour in the fact that Azgeda lands would somehow be safer for her than the lush forests they’d landed in.

Beyond her already hectic schedule, Clarke formulates a plan. A way to test her influence in the court, to experiment with her political power, and to help the people she truly desires to aid. For there’s no question in her mind anymore; the Azgeda people, despite the variances in culture that she may never rationalize, inspire the same feeling of protectiveness in Clarke as her own. So she plots and advises Roan in secret, biding her time to attempt a change.

That time comes about in a meeting much like any of the others. It varies only in the arguments fought early in the session, and the parties pitted against each other. Clarke knows which people she needs on her side to implement her plan, and she knows which will oppose her out of hand. She wishes she had a more solid basis for gaining allies than “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”, but Clarke will take what she can get.

The council session returns, as Clarke had known it would, to the topic of the impacts of snowfall. Details of suffering and starvation, each advisor determined to show that the people they represent are more adversely affected than the others. Each one demands supplies from the others; Lake regions insist the military is eating more than their fill, the military demands better hunting from the northern forests, the northern forests state they wouldn’t need to hunt as much if the field workers had brought in better crop, and so on and so on.

The discussion arises every week with increasing vigor, and it usually signals the start of the end of the meeting. There is never any topic after it, and never any resolution to be had. Clarke knows that after a few instances of bared weapons and violent threats, Roan will dismiss them, and they’ll set aside the issue to be brought up again the next day.

Clarke is determined to change that.

“You are part of the Coalition,” Clarke says into the growing argument, her voice barely loud enough to be heard. But the Azgeda words draw the attention of enough of the counselors that when they stop and stare at her, the rest do as well. They all seem to be in various stages of shock, either at Clarke’s implied suggestion or simply at her talking at all. One advisor from the Eastern lakes stares at her as if she grew a second head, and Clarke guesses he forgot she was actually there for a purpose, and that she could speak their language.

She takes advantage of their stunned silence and continues, “The Coalition will give you food, if you say you need it. It is your right within the clans to call for aid in a time of need.”

“We don’t need anything from them.” Aryn, representative of the Western fields, spits on the table in front of her in distaste.

“Azgeda are dying of starvation. I believe that counts as need.” Clarke keeps her voice calm, and Aryn growls as she pushes herself out of her seat.

“Skaikru bitch, you know nothing of Azgeda, we-”

“Enough.” Roan barks the command, cutting off Aryn’s rant before it has a chance to start. She settles instead for glaring at Clarke, and Clarke ensures her expression is entirely unfazed. “Wanheda knows death better than any of us. She has a point, that our people dying is a serious concern.”

“King-” One of the advisors begins to protest, but Roan cuts them off with a raised hand.

“However, taking aid from the Coalition will never work. Even if we did so, the people would see everything spoil and themselves starve before eating a single scrap of meat. We cannot be weakened by charity.”

Aryn sneers triumphantly at Clarke, but she is not dissuaded. She squares her shoulders and turns to address Roan directly, reading something more in his words and tone than what he strictly said. She thinks he wants to take the aid, the same way he wants to care for his people, but the traditions of his people disallow it. In his political phrasing she hears a challenge, for her to find a way to save the people from a cold and hungry death.

And Clarke believes she just may have it.

“Then show that you aren’t weaker for it. Host tournaments, displays of fighting skill, in all the settlements. All Azgeda who fight recieve a small portion of food, victors receive a feast.”

A smile flits across Roan’s lips so quick Clarke could easily have missed it were she not looking for his reaction, and it makes her feel more secure in her stance. Aryn frowns deeply, and another councillor, a giant of a man name Bran, slams his fist on the table with a deep laugh.

“I like it! Fights to the death for food, with none of that messy cannibalism stuff.” Bran shoots a look at the Eastern lake advisor with the last, and the man - Eyr, if Clarke recalls correctly - bares his teeth.

“That was sorted a long time ago,” he hisses, and Clarke is intrigued and wary of the story behind it at once.

She considers correcting Bran that the fights would not, in fact, be to the death, but then thinks better of it. Best not to shoot down her first supporter, the details can be sorted out at a later time.

“It would still be charity-” One of the younger women begins to protest, but Clarke doesn’t let her finish.

“The concern with charity is that it weakens the people, yes? Well, this would prove their strength. And keep them in fighting form when they’re unable to wage war due to snow.” She points out.

“Do you think our lives luxurious enough that we can spare time for games of fighting, Skaikru? The people are-” Aryn snarls, and Clarke cuts her off as well.

“Idle, with time to spare, according to your own reports. Did you not say that the fields had frozen too early, and the farmers were unable to work the full season? That they were turning to bar fights and raiding, more so than usual, out of boredom?” Clarke queries calmly as Aryn sputters.

“Well, yes, but-”

“Then your farmers may find a better outlet for their energies in the fights,” Clarke finishes soundly, internally thrilled with the dumbfounded look on Aryn’s face.

After that, a full on shouting match breaks out, which Clarke does not take part in. The room seems to be split violently in favour or against the fights, with precious few remaining silent. The argument veers from the topic of the tournaments to the real issue, the subject of accepting aid from the coalition, and neither side is willing to give ground. Each member of the council seems to believe that shouting louder means they’re more right, and quite quickly only Roan and Clarke remain silent in the midst of it.

Unseen in the chaos as the verbal bouts threaten to turn physical, Roan catches Clarke’s eye and gives her a nod and a quirked smile, before resuming his regular lofty air. He allows the fight to continue, as he always does, until one of the advisors lays a hand on the hilt of their blade.

“Enough,” Roan barks, with a sharp gesture of his hand. Immediately, the argument ends and everyone turns towards their King, respectful even if still fuming. Roan waits a moment, presumably to allow people to calm down, and continues, “I have heard enough. I shall accept aid from the Coalition, on behalf of the Azgeda. There will be displays of fighting prowess to earn some of the bounty. For those who are too proud to accept this, the cold is always willing to test strength in other ways.”

The edict is simple and direct, and many of the advisors look just short of murderous, but one and all they bow their heads. Clarke follows suit, briefly, and feels genuinely proud of herself. Sure, she’d just made herself a lot of enemies, but she’d also proven herself a worthy political adversary, and she’d saved many of the Azgeda from suffering. At some point, the well being of the Azgeda as a whole had become important to her, and Clarke doesn't question it in the glow of her victory.

“Advisors to major settlements, remain that we may set rules suited for your people. Everyone else may leave.” Roan dismisses half his council, and Clarke stands along with those who inform Roan of conditions other than those of his villages. They all clap their fists to their chest and bow their heads to Roan, except Clarke who simply nods to him, and exit the council chamber.

“Well done!” Bran chortles and claps a massive hand on Clarke’s shoulder, which makes her stumble a half step that she hastily recovers from, “I knew Skaikru would have some good ideas. We should celebrate!”

Clarke knows enough about Bran to know he’s always looking for an excuse to celebrate with a keg of fermented apple juice, and she’s about to turn him down gently when a councillor from behind her pipes up.

“More like mourn, since she just convinced our King to kill our culture.”

Clarke turns to look at the speaker - Onto, the young boy who reports for the foresters of the far north - and frowns.

“I doubt I could convince your King of anything he didn’t believe in.” She doesn’t question the strength of a culture that could be killed by one act of charity, as she wants to, yet Onto reacts just as violently as if she had, the twin short blades he wields at his hips in his hands in seconds.

“You do not know us or our King, no matter what Skaikru witchery you’ve used on him,” Onto spits, as the other advisors draw away from Clarke and him, watching intently and making no move to defuse or aggravate the situation. Clarke wants to react to his statement, to insist on her knowledge of the Azgeda culture after having been part of it for as long as she has. She wants to draw her sword and defend herself, but she takes a deep breath and does no such thing.

“We are advisors, we advise the King. King Roan makes decisions as he sees fit. You had as much a chance as I did to change his mind.” Clarke hopes logic might cut through to him, but Onto narrows his eyes in a glare.

“I will not allow you to corrupt us with your lies.”

“Advisor Onto-”

“Do not speak my name,” Onto hisses, and Clarke reads a shift in his posture that she knows the meaning of. Planting a foot to launch himself, angling his body to be a smaller target, grip settling on the handles of his blades, Clarke knows she’s about to be attacked in the hallway in front of everyone.

Her hand is on her sword when one of the guards steps forward, placing a hand on Onto’s shoulder. The contact startles him enough that his attacks stalls before it begins, and Clarke and him both regard the guard with curiosity.

“By order of the King, Wanheda is not to be harmed.”

“What?” The indignant exclamation of disbelief comes from both of them, Onto presumably for being stopped by a Kingsguard and by order of the King he clearly is loyal to, and Clarke for… Well, she couldn’t say quite why being saved irked her so much. Perhaps because it felt far too much like coddling, and just when she finally felt she was gaining her own feet to stand upon.

“Sheathe your weapons, or you will be ejected from the court,” the guard continues, and Onto blanches. Clarke can imagine that being sent away, a disgraced reject of the King’s court, wouldn’t turn out well for him. He does hesitate a moment, but his swords slide back into their sheathes before the guard has to issue a second warning, at which the hand leaves his shoulder. He stalks away from the guard, bumping Clarke’s shoulder as he passes.

“You will pay for this,” he hisses, quiet enough for only Clarke to hear. She sets her jaw and doesn’t react as he walks away and the crowd disperses, no potential for blood to keep them rooted in place anymore.

Onto’s name gets added to Clarke’s mental list of people who want her dead, and she decides to take her practices more seriously from now on. Perhaps she ought to seek out some other partners to spar with, an idea which seems very appealing as she stares down the guard who had issued Roan’s edict. The guard seems unfazed, but doesn’t return to her post by the door even as the last of the stragglers disappears from sight, leaving only the normal light traffic in the halls.

Clarke holds the guard’s gaze for a moment longer before nodding shortly and turning on her heel. Her blood is pumping, now, and she wants an outlet for the energy of her almost-fight, and for her frustration with Roan’s protection. She might have needed it, maybe Onto would have bested her, but now she can never know. It’s not so much that she wanted to fight the boy, more that she wishes she could have discovered her own worth. 

“Wanheda,” the guard calls out, and Clarke glances over her shoulder to look at her. “The King will want to speak with you.”

“The King can wait. I’m going to train, he can find me _after_ if he wants to talk.” Clarke states soundly and turns her head back.

“It may not be safe yet.”

Clarke clenches her jaw and takes a deep breath, reminding herself the guard is only acting on orders. She doesn’t turn back to the guard as she asks her, “What did you call me?”

“I don’t-”

“When you stopped me from walking away, what did you call me? What is my title?” Clarke presses the bewildered guard.

“Wanheda,” she answers after a moment.

“Yes. Wanheda. Commander of death. If I say it’s safe for me, it is.” Clarke begins walking after she finishes her statement, one that no longer fills her with as much guilt and conflict as it once had. Perhaps she’s no longer merely using her title, maybe she’s learned on some level to embrace it. She throws a command over her shoulder as she leaves, “Resume your post, Kingsguard.”

The practice room is empty as Clarke had expected it to be when she enters, and she breathes in the now familiar smell of dirt and old sweat, emptying her mind of the conflict. Her emotions don’t leave so easily, but taking her aggression out by swinging a sword is a lot easier when she’s not focusing on the source of it. The practice blade in her hands weighs on calluses and Clarke is a little proud of that. She swings the blade and feels how much easier it is than when she had started, and her anger leaves her as she settles into routine and the thrill that what once had been exertion is now so familiar.

Clarke imagines Roan standing before her, blade in his hand, taunting her into attacking him like a fool. She doesn’t take the bait offered by her own mind, instead allowing it to give her an attack to counter, first. Counter, sidestep, attack. Again and again, Clarke combines the moves she knows, blade carving through the air against nothing. Clarke could take it easy, a few simple moves and then disarming, but she pushes herself a bit harder. Sure, she had come here to work out her emotions, but there’s no reason not to turn it into an actual training session.

She sinks into focus on the movement of the blade in her hands, almost a trance akin to that of studying new books or battle plans. Everything only becomes relevant when it immediately pertains to her; the smell of sweat and dirt forgotten, the dust in the air a mild inconvenience only when she breathes it in, the sand floor only mattering when it causes her footing to slip. Her target becomes more real, her movements more precise, swinging for anatomical weak spots. 

After a time, Clarke disarms her imaginary enemy just as violently as if she’d had an actual opponent, with a technically unnecessary flourished half turn that Roan definitely would have smacked her fort. She grins to herself as she pants in the cold air, exertion no less for lack of an actual opponent. An experimental heft of her practice blade informs Clarke that she’s not quite as tired as she’d thought she would be, so she swings her blade once and prepares to throw in a little more practice.

“Advisor Clarke,” a voice calls cooly into the room, and Clarke almost drops her sword in surprise. She’d forgotten that the practice ring is technically a space accessible by any of the court, even if this one is generally left for the King himself. She takes a breath to calm her racing heart and turns towards the newcomer.

“Advisor Tora.” Clarke inclines her chin slightly to the young woman, easily identified by the sharp lines of scars cutting from her temple down her neck, almost like lightning. She notes that Tora doesn’t return the vague greeting, although that isn’t particularly unusual among the court. “Are you looking for someone to spar with?”

Tora smiles, the same way one would to a child who offered to help lift something heavy, and shakes her head. “No.”

“Okay,” Clarke simply says, when no more information is forthcoming. She turns to return her mind to training, but as soon as she raises her sword, Tora speaks again.

“I do require your assistance, however.”

Clarke is shocked once again, and turns to Tora with her brow furrowed. “You do?”

“Of course.” Tora smiles, the expression seeming entirely political and reminding Clarke that most of the other advisors have been playing the game of the court since well before she’d been on earth. She steps into the ring, and Clarke allows the tip of her practice sword to drop to the ground. “You see, Roan listens to you. Do you know why he listens to you?”

Clarke bites back the response of “Because my plans makes sense” and instead opts for silence. Tora waits for a moment before shrugging slightly and walking past Clarke, who turns to watch the path of her pacing.

“I don’t expect you to, of course. _Wanheda_.” The title seems to linger in Tora’s mouth, and when she turns to face Clarke once more, there’s a certain gleam in her eye that reminds Clarke of a few of the delinquents she had kept her distance from. Tora inclines her head to the side, smile still in place, “Do you think it’s because you’re smart? Because you’re one of his advisors? Because he _likes_ you?”

Clarke is about to swear that away, but Tora doesn’t give her a chance, gesturing sharply and resuming her pacing around Clarke, definitely circling her now. “It’s not. It’s because you’re Wanheda. You command the very powers of death, what is a King to that? If he didn’t listen to you, you might burn our people alive, or afflict us with plague, or make our men infertile.”

Tora counts off Clarke’s powers on her fingers as she continues walking in circles around her, and Clarke tries to remember when she had made men infertile. She wonders what powers she’ll get next, if the storytelling continues.

“Now, don’t get me wrong, I respect all of that. Were circumstances different, I would applaud you.”

“But they’re not?” Clarke interjects, trying to get some information as to what Tora is actually trying to get out of this. She turns to face Clarke shockingly quickly, and shakes her head.

“But they’re not,” Tora repeats with a sigh. She spreads her hands wide in a sign of defeat. “You see, for the good of our people, I need the King to listen to me. Or the other advisors. And there’s only one way that he won’t be afraid to go against Wanheda.”

“Which is?” Clarke feels the implication slinking into her stomach like acid, and she hopes she’s wrong.

“He needs to know that Wanheda will never go against the Azgeda.” Tora’s expression is entirely ernest, and Clarke grips her wooden blade more securely, wishing it were the one Roan had gifted her.

“I wouldn’t-”

“Oh, but you _might_. You aren’t Azgeda, no matter where you live, and, well…” Tora trails off with a shrug.

Clarke thanks Roan for attacking her out of the blue in order to train her to be prepared for surprise attacks as Tora pulls her sword from her hip and lashes in towards Clarke’s throat, so quickly Clarke didn’t even consciously notice. Her body moved as soon as Tora’s did, however, so the killing blow misses its mark, instead connecting with the corner of Clarke’s jaw. She hardly feels it as the blade in her grip grows lighter and her heart pumps adrenaline through her veins, only registers a vague flash of cold and a trickle of wetness. Blood, part of her brain informs her, but the rest of her brain is reacting to Tora’s next attack, falling back and raising her wooden sword to block Tora’s steel.

“Better than I thought you would be,” Tora quips as her sword glances off the training sword, a chip of wood falling to the ground. “But I’ve been watching you train. You can’t beat me.”

“I thought I commanded death,” Clarke spits as she walks backwards carefully, sword at the ready as Tora circles her, looking for an opening to attack.

“In grand wars and stories. This is a fight.” Tora grins at the word “fight”, a feral baring of teeth, “Here you’re only human.”

Clarke gives up on formulating a response in favour of watching Tora the way that she’d learned to watch Roan. The shifting of muscles, the placement of feet, the flexing of fingers around a hilt. Everything that can tell her where to hit, where she can break past an attack. But with Tora, she doesn’t find anything she can exploit, not when she can already feel the ache in her fingers where “life or death” energy is fading in the face of exhaustion.She grits her teeth and wills it away, and sees the lunge just as Tora moves towards her. She barely avoids a gut stab, instead getting her knuckles sliced open with a misplaced block.

Tora doesn’t give Clarke a breather before swinging her blade in an arc towards her torso again. Clarke drops to the dirt to avoid it, knowing her wooden sword won’t hold up to the real deal much longer. The drop happens without any momentum to help her to roll to her feet, so instead of clambering back up clumsily and dying for it, Clarke heaves herself into Tora’s legs. Tora almost sidesteps the brutish trip, but she still falls to the ground next to Clarke.

Clarke pushes herself to her knees and swings her sword down on Tora’s head, all the strength she has in the strike. Steel bars her path, and Tora barks a laugh as Clarke’s practice blade finally breaks. She bashes her fist into the wound on Clarke’s jaw, knocking her away, and Clarke uses the opportunity to regain her feet as Tora climbs to her own. Tora swings her blade and tilts her head to the side, narrowing her eyes and dropping her smile.

“Wanheda _must_ be Azgeda.” The steel in Tora’s voice matches the steel in her hands, and Clarke steps into her next lunge. Tora’s eyes widen in surprise, and Clarke feels the cold and wet spread down her side.

“Maybe, but it won’t be you,” Clarke hisses into Tora’s ear, stepping forward another half pace to press them chest to chest. She presses her splintered wooden blade further into Tora’s stomach with a sharp twist, and then removes it. 

Tora looks down at the red wood with shock, and then at her own abdomen. She drops her sword and touches her shredded clothing, the light leathers favoured by those of the court. Her fingers turn red in a heartbeat, and she falls to her knees. She looks up at Clarke, and for the first time, she smiles a smile that seems genuinely happy.

“To die by Wanheda.” Tora coughs, and nods with a grimace. “No death is more noble.”

“Death is death,” Clarke states, “None are noble.”

Tora shakes her head slightly and bows her head, eyes drifting shut. Clarke watches her, as her breathing slows and the red of her blood stains the dirt. She watches until Tora breathes her last and her body slumps unrestrained against the forces of gravity. Then she turns on her heel, leaving the body and both swords behind in the ring.

Adrenaline carries Clarke into the hall, but not much further than than. Her jaw begins to burn with an urgent pain, but more than that, her side bites nausea into her core. She grits her teeth and swallows down bile as she leans against the wall, peeling up the edge of her shirt to look at the wound she sustained in order to save her life. She tries to ascertain the damage, but it’s difficult when the edges of the wound keep blurring, and a fog keeps creeping into her vision each time she blinks.

“Shit,” Clarke gasps, and then the fog solidifies into unconsciousness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This took so much longer than I meant it to, I'm so sorry! But it's here, and I'm eternally grateful to any of you who have stuck out the wait with me. Especially [coldsaturn](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) who edited this beast in one night, like wow, she's a literal saint.
> 
> Anyway, I'm not going to ramble excuses for the delay, simply thank you all for reading, and feel free to yell at me [on tumblr](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) :)


	6. Six

Clarke feels all sorts of intensely wrong. She’s on fire and freezing at the same time, the world swims and shifts without sense when she opens her eyes, and her head feels impossibly light while her body is a leaden stone with a solid core of pain. She knows she feels hands on her at one point, a comforting touch. At some point after - or maybe before, time stubbornly refuses to follow the rules - there are different hands, and they bring even more pain. She thinks she screams, but maybe she doesn’t.

Then there’s blackness, blessed voids where she can just barely avoid the reality of what’s happening to her.

_Fever._

Her nightmares are now freed from their restrictions, stepping from her dreams into the waking world, and Clarke whimpers futilely as monsters of ice rip her flesh. When she closes her eyes against them, she hears the advisors whispering about her. 

_Not to be trusted._

_Wanheda must be Azgeda._

_Skaikru bitch._

The advisors’ voices become those of her own people, of the people she once lead. She doesn’t want to listen to them, so she opens her eyes with no small struggle, and lets the ice take her.

At times, the comforting hands come again. Light touches, just on her forearm, or gently holding her hand. They always come before more pain does, as a buffer, a bulwark against the suffering. She tries to hold onto them, to tell them to stay and keep the demons away from her, but her body refuses her commands.

At one point, there’s a whisper, and something presses against her forehead briefly, very lightly. A touch with something rough, and she wrinkles her nose at the sensation. She tries to open her eyes to see what it was, but by the time she does, she’s alone with her nightmares again.

There are brief moments of lucidity, or at least Clarke thinks there are. Moments when she can watch the snow fall outside her window, feel the weak winter sun play across her skin, smell the fire someone is keeping stoked in her room. She tries to remember, during those moments; how she got here, why she’s feverish, who’s been helping her. But they never last long, and she’s so very tired, and the nightmares are hungry for her.

One day, after… Days? Weeks? Months? Hours? Some time, which Clarke cannot recall, her fever breaks while she sleeps. She wakes from a void free of nightmares, and she can tell immediately it’s not to a moment of lucidity, but a proper waking. She can feel it in the claminess of her skin, the ache in her bones, and the itching in her gut. In the lapses in fever she couldn’t feel her body as coherently as that.

Clarke groans softly and pushes her sheets down, the simple task a monumental effort urged by the burning itch in her abdomen. It tickles at her mind, and she knows if she can figure out what it is, she’ll remember what happened. Like a word on the tip of her tongue, the memory begs her to trigger it. So Clarke continues moving agonizingly slowly, pulling up the loose linen bedshirt that someone must have dressed her in.

Thick bandages wrap around her stomach, and Clarke grazes her fingertips over them, settling above the uncomfortable sensation. She presses, very gently, and confirms in a flash of blinding pain that steals her breath that yes, there’s an injury there. She covers the area with a flat palm and goes through her memories, the ones before the fever which are still kindly enough in the correct order.

The council meeting, her confrontation with Onto, practicing, and-

Tora.

Clarke had been stabbed. She has no recollection of who had found her, but whoever it was had saved her. A gut wound, not tended to quickly, could have easily ended her. Given her current sad state, it almost did end her.

Clarke looks around her room for any indication of how much time has passed, seeing nothing of note other than the plethora of solutions and bandages next to her bed, presumably left by whatever healer has been attending to her. She slides her gaze over them to see if she recognizes anything, and her eyes alight on something set next to all the vials. A small jar, coated in dust, familiar as the others are not.

Clarke sits up with a great amount of effort and picks up the jar, turning it over in her hands slowly before unscrewing the lid. Lavender and mint, a near miraculous painkiller in an innocuous container. The scent of it comforts her, promises aid and protection, and Clarke inhales once, deeply. She considers her pain, growing steadily as her wits slowly return to her, and ruefully replaces the lid, setting the jar aside.

A warrior can manage pain. Clarke holds the thought in her teeth as she grits them and swings her legs over the side of her bed. She knows what her mother would say, knows that she should stay in bed and rest until she is whole and hale again. But her mother wouldn’t have killed Tora, wouldn’t have been able to kill Tora. Clarke pushes herself unsteadily to her feet and breathes deeply as the world swims for a moment.

She doesn’t want to go far, and she is strong enough to manage, she just needs to get out of that bed. The bed still dressed in fever soaked furs, and crawling with memories of hallucinations. So Clarke tries to hold in her grunts of pain and crosses the floor one measured pace at a time, spine straight and chin held high. She only goes a few steps to a chair positioned to look out her window, and she slumps into it gratefully when she reaches it. Consciousness swims around her, but as she sits and regulates her breathing, it returns to proper order.

Outside Clarke’s window, the snow is pristine, shining vaguely in the twilight of what is either early morning or evening. She stares out at it longingly, urges to draw it and to play in it warring within her. Neither would befit her station, her reputation as Wanheda surely stronger now than ever. Clarke shifts awkwardly in the chair to reach out and touch the chilled glass, allowing it to ground her.

Tora. Clarke wonders if she’ll be punished for that. Sure, Azgeda kill each other all the time, but as Tora herself had so adamantly pointed out, Clarke is not Azgeda. A foreign leader, under a political truce, murdering an advisor to the King… Clarke presses her palm flat to the glass and tries to envision the punishment. Public beating, torture, imprisonment, excommunication, execution, the list continues to grow in Clarke’s mind until she resolutely puts an end to it. Her worrying would change nothing.

The door to Clarke’s room opens, and she turns to look over her shoulder at the visitor. She had been expecting a healer, but instead she takes in the familiar form of the King of Azgeda, perpetual stony expression falling as he looks at her empty bed. His brow furrows and he steps forward before scanning the room, relief plain on his face when he takes in Clarke seated in her chair.

“Clarke, you’re awake.” Roan states the obvious, and Clarke pushes herself to her feet abruptly with a small smile. His brow creases and starts towards her at her movement. “You really shouldn’t-”

“I’m fine, Roan,” Clarke says calmly. 

Her body, however, agrees with Roan’s protest, and her uncertain consciousness slips from her grip as she begins to walk. She doesn’t _quite_ black out, as such, but she feels with a sickening certainty the inevitable approach of the ground as her legs buckle. Before the impact, she’s stopped by a solid warm force catching her and then lifting her very carefully.

Clarke knows, before her vision returns to her, that Roan has caught her once again. The grey haze of fainting clears, and she finds herself looking up at the stubble on his jaw from her position in his arms as he carries her back to her bed. He looks angry, and Clarke feels her stomach sink. No matter his reaction to her collapse, he must be here to dole out her punishment, and given the deep displeasure he gives off, it won’t be good for her.

Clarke bites her tongue as Roan lays her in her bed, not wishing to upset him further by protesting his assistance. He fusses over her for a moment before taking a seat next to her bed, and Clarke feels guilt curling in her gut like an angry beast.

“I’m sorry,” Clarke whispers, as Roan stares at his clasped hands. He looks up at her, confusion creasing his features.

“For what?”

“Tora. She- I-” Clarke makes a few false starts with her still scattered thoughts before taking a deep breath and gathering herself, “I know she was a valuable member of your council, and I’ll accept whatever punishment is handed down.”

Roan frowns at Clarke for a moment before simply stating, “I see.” and lapsing back into silence. He stands, crossing over to Clarke’s window, and she wants to protest to him. Wants to say it was self defense, that she didn’t have a choice, that Tora was crazy. But she knows she must accept the consequences of her actions no matter her reasoning, so she remains silent.

“What do you think the consequences would have been for her, had she succeeded in her goal? I’m assuming she meant to kill you, to become the next Wanheda.” Roan breaks the silence, and Clarke’s features crease with confusion.

“I… I’m not sure. I didn’t think there would be any, I guess.” Clarke realizes as she speaks that she doesn’t actually know that much about the laws of Azgeda. She knows their customs, in a roundabout fashion, but not the rules that bind them as a people. 

“Did she challenge you?” Roan asks, and Clarke finds herself off balance despite being lying down. She had been expecting punishment, not questions.

“Did-?” Clarke cuts herself off, trying to remember. What counted as a challenge? She had come at Clarke with her intentions laid out, was that a challenge?

“Did she issue you a formal challenge, in front of witnesses, to determine who deserved to wield the mantle and power of the great Wanheda?” Roan clarifies, and Clarke shakes her head, before realizing Roan can’t see the action, given he’s still staring out over the frozen field.

“Uh, no.”

“Did you come to her, with your intent being to end her life or cause her grievous harm?” Roan is incredibly still, and Clarke can see the mantle of King in the lines of his shoulders.

“No.”

“Did she come at you, alone, with the intent of causing you grievous harm and impeding your ability to serve Azgeda and to offer your council to the King?”

“Yes,” Clarke states soundly, and Roan turns towards her. He looks at her as he looks at the rest of his subjects: a strong figure to follow, who passes down unquestionable judgement. 

“Then the people of Azgeda owe you a debt, for carrying out Advisor Tora’s sentence for treasonous actions when such a thing is not in your normal duties. And the King owes you a personal debt for uncovering a conspiracy to undermine his council and destabilize his government.”

“So,” Clarke draws out the word, the meaning of Roan’s edict taking a moment to sink in properly, “I’m not going to be punished.”

The aura of King fades in a heartbeat, and Roan crosses to the chair next to Clarke’s bed, slumping into it. “Bran thinks we should throw a feast in your honour, and send word to all the people of Wanheda’s latest victory.”

“Bran always thinks we should throw a feast,” Clarke states with dry humour, feeling significantly more comfortable, albeit still confused, now that she knows she’s not going to be beaten or put to death.

Roan lets out a small chuckle at that, and Clarke smiles at him. It’s odd, thinking back on the conditions in which she had come here, to draw comfort from his presence, but she does. Among her people, she had been one thing, a creature of necessity. She could have lived her whole life being what they needed, and they would have trusted and to a certain extent cared for her because of it. But here, she has changed. She doesn’t want to be protected anymore, and she finds herself not particularly caring if people like her for how she is. It’s still nice to have a few like Roan and Bran on her side, but she feels more free, for all that she is still technically a political prisoner here.

“Anyway,” Clarke continues, shifting in her bed to a more upright position with a groan, “it wasn’t that much of a victory.”

“You’re in pain,” Roan frowns deeply, and Clarke laughs.

“Yeah, getting stabbed will do that to you, apparently.”

Roan reaches to where she had set down the painkiller earlier and begins unscrewing the top without another word, and Clarke places her hands over his to stop him. He looks up at her in confusion, and she smiles at him.

“It’s okay. I can manage.” She tries to convey what she means with her gaze, to tell him that she’s better than the pain, that even though she isn’t a King of Azgeda, she can still tough it out.

“You’re sure?” Roan confirms, and Clarke nods, giving his hands a comforting squeeze. He weighs her, as he had so many times in her first months in Otta, and she welcomes it. Let him measure her and find her meeting the mark, see her as a warrior as much as he is. Perhaps not as skilled, but she feels there’s more to being a fighter than skill. He seems to find what he’s looking for, and he sighs before nodding, “Okay.”

Clarke releases his hands at that, and he puts the painkiller in his pocket. She’s not sad to see it go for the crutch it represents, but she is a little sad she won’t be able to smell it anymore. The scent had been soothing, perhaps she’ll have to see if she can get bouquets of herbs for her room. If she set the dried herbs in the sunlight of her window, maybe she could come back to a pleasant room at the end of the day, rather than one which smells solely of woodsmoke and beeswax candles.

“How have things been?” Clarke asks. “The games?”

“Always business, hm?” The corner of Roan’s lips curls in the slightest of smiles, and he leans back in his chair. “They’re progressing. Don’t worry about it too much, you just need to focus on recovering.”

“I can still help.” Clarke insists, and Roan shakes his head.

“You won’t be any help if you hurt yourself worse and die on us. Get better, and then we’ll talk.”

“But-” Clarke begins to protest, but a knock on the door interrupts her. She frowns at Roan for a moment before resolving to discuss it with him later and raising her voice, “Come in.”

“Wanheda!” Bran’s boisterous presence barrels into the room, and great big grin on his face as he crosses the room to her bedside. Clarke can’t help but return it in an echo, despite her surprise at the advisor coming to visit her. He stops halfway across her room to clasp his hand to his chest, noticing Roan’s presence, “My King, my apologies, am I interrupting?”

“Of course not. I should be getting back to my duties anyway.” Roan stands, and like that, he’s King Roan again. Clarke wonders if he ever gets tired of being so regal around everyone. Well, everyone save her, it seems. He nods to Clarke and Bran before leaving the room, and Bran takes the seat he had vacated with a chuckle.

“So you’re still among the living, well done!” Bran claps a hand on Clarke’s shoulder, surprisingly gently given that Clarke has never witnessed him do anything with less than his full, blundering strength. “I suppose you really do command death, gut wounds are nasty work, not many come back from that.”

“Luck, I suppose,” Clarke shrugs, and Bran laughs, laying back in the chair and propping his feet up next to Clarke’s on the bed. She feels like she should be offended at his level of comfort with her, just this side of disrespectful, but she can’t help but find it warm in a way very little in the Ice Nation is.

“Well then, I should spend more time with you, maybe some of that luck will rub off on me, huh?”

“Maybe,” Clarke smiles, and then a thought crosses her mind. “Say, Bran, I can’t quite make the trips to the council chamber. Would you be able to keep me updated on what’s going on?”

“Of course! All we’re talking about these days is the games, anyway, and that was your brilliant idea to begin with.” He pauses for a moment, his face falling into a sombre expression, “They did make it so the fights aren’t to the death, sorry, I fought them as hard as I could on that one.”

“That’s okay, I’m sure you did your best.” Clarke restrains a laugh at that one, and thanks Roan and whoever else had stood up to the large, bloody-minded man. “What else?”

“If I’m going to talk politics, I need a drink.” Bran stands surprisingly quickly, and Clarke nods. She suspects Bran needs a drink in most cases, and she isn’t going to be the one to judge his life choices. He produces a flask from his heavy overcoat and goes hunting around Clarke’s room for cups, passing over the ones next to the jars and vials of presumably healing concoctions with a wrinkled nose. He finds the cups on her desk in time, and picks two up, gesturing one at Clarke.“You?”

“Yes, please,” Clarke responds, and Bran pours them two shots of something that smells a hell of a lot like Monty’s moonshine, taking his seat as he hands one to Clarke.

“To the games, and the great Wanheda!” Bran toasts, and Clarke raises her cup.

“To Bran, noble messenger to the great Wanheda,” she teases, drawing a hearty laugh from Bran.

“Indeed!”

With a clink of the rims of their cups against each other, they knock back their shots, and Clarke relishes the burn of alcohol down her throat, pooling in her stomach kindly. Bran pours himself a second, and she waves the offer off for her, in response to which he knocks back a third. After that, his flask disappears again, and he nods soundly.

“Well then, here’s where the council is as of today. Of course, not much has been decided since half the advisors are still arguing if it’s a good idea or not, but…”

As Bran details every decision made by the council and King, including quite enthusiastic descriptions of every feud and near fight she had missed, Clarke finds a warmth completely unrelated to the one shot seeping into her bones. She listens intently and finds herself at home in her purpose, in the politics of a nation she had considered entirely foreign not that long ago. It turns out that really not anything other than that the fights would not be to the death had been decided, but Clarke still finds herself enjoying Bran’s expressive tales of basically nothing, and she smiles the whole time.

-

“It’s a shame, Wanheda-”

“Clarke,”Clarke gently corrects Bran. It’s not so much that she minds the title, simply that it seems too formal for casual conversation between potential friends.

“Ah, yes, well, it’s a shame how these sessions have been going lately. You had such a good idea, and now it’s looking like the winter is going to be done and all will be sorted for good or ill before any decisions get made.”

“That bad, huh?” Clarke inquires, and Bran snorts.

“Can’t even go ten minutes without a fight breaking out, and worse than it was before. King keeps ending them before challenges can actually be issued, but that means we’re hardly in official meetings for more than half an hour.”

“Is Roan working on the games without the council’s approval, then?” 

“I hope so.” Bran frowns for a moment before shaking off the serious expression and smiling at Clarke, “None of us know what he’s been up to, but I’m sure he’s working on something.”

“Has he given any hints in court?” Clarke isn’t comforted by Bran’s small attempt. She had almost lost her life over the games, and even if she hadn’t, she put too much of herself into the idea and execution to have it fall to the wayside.

“Well,” Bran clears his throat and looks down at his hands, fiddling his thumbs, “He hasn’t been in court. We had sort of been hoping he’d been keeping time with you, making sure Wanheda recovers properly, all that.”

“Oh,” Clarke tries to hide her disappointment. She had been hoping the same thing, that Roan’s absence during her recovery had been due to him being absorbed in court and council duties. Since her first day truly awake, she had only seen the healer and Bran, and a few of the servants. “No, he hasn’t.”

“Well, as I said, I’m sure he’s working on it.” Bran gives Clarke one more smile and claps a hand on her shoulder, pushing himself to his feet. “Those of us in favour of your games are meeting to make our own plans, and I really ought to be on my way. Rest well, Wan- Clarke.”

“Thank you, Bran. I trust you to fight for the games in my stead.”

“No worries about that,” Bran chuckles, leaving her room and leaving Clarke feeling… empty.

She can feel in the honest language of injury that she’s not ready to retake her role within the court yet, but without it, everything she had thought she had seems to be slipping away. Her games were stalling in the mire of politics, whatever camaraderie she had been building with Roan was apparently not enough for him to visit her more than once during her recovery, and she knows the strength she had built with her blade is fading every day she lays in her bed and paces her room. 

Beyond her occasional meetings with Bran and her even more infrequent visits from the healer, Clarke is confined to her rooms with nothing to do. Forced idleness doesn’t sit well with her, but neither does injuring herself further in an attempt to do more than she should. So she pushes her body right to its limit and not a centimeter further, and then she rests. 

And rests.

And rests some more.

In the midst of all the resting, Clarke realizes that she doesn’t really have anything to do when politics, fighting, and surviving are off the table. She doesn’t have any books to read, in fact she’s relatively certain the Azgeda didn’t actually preserve any books after _praimfiya_. The written language still exists, but she’s only ever seen it used for marking out royal decrees and plans for war, never something she would peruse to pass the time. And without books or holovids or any of the luxuries from the Ark, Clarke only has one way of passing the time.

So, one day when her side is burning with the peculiar pain that tells you an injury is healing, yet demands you rip it open to quell the itching inferno, Clarke sits herself at her rarely used desk. She sets aside pieces of paper that she had plotted her way of giving food to the Azgeda on, lingering on her finalized plans for the games and wishing she could be in the council rooms now to see it through to its end. Pushing the thought from her mind, Clarke picks up a piece of charcoal and sets a blank piece of paper in front of herself.

She tells herself that she’s going to draw the snow, or what she can remember of Arkadia, or perhaps her mother’s smile. Instead, her hand traces abstract loops and lines. It marks out the curves on Roan’s temples, the scars on his back, the deliberate wounds of as many Azgeda as she can remember. She tries to find the story behind them in drawing them, but comes to the conclusion that only the bearer of the scar can truly know what it means.

Clarke sees the lingering mark of Tora’s blade on her knuckles, knows there’s another mark on her jaw and a far larger one on her abdomen, and she traces her fingers over the dimpled skin as she debates what to draw next. How would she tell the story of her fight with Tora, if she were to brand it into her flesh for the world to see?

She knows where she would bear the mark, where her side is already aflame as if being branded from the inside. Clarke tries sketching something curving and flowing like Trikru tattoos, but none of them feel right when she imagines them over the scar she’ll have as soon as it’s done being an injury. No, there was nothing so soft about the story, so Clarke switches to sharp lines akin to those Tora herself had borne. Although designs flow onto the page freely, she knows none of them are hers.

Instead of trying to design something, Clarke thinks of the battle. Of the natural flow of conflict, a curve marked down on the paper. The clash of metal blade against wooden practice sword, a harsh stop. Her fumbles become angles, her triumphs victorious swoops of charcoal. The tattoo climbs her ribs in the design, and then it trails off, as smoke. Indefinite, the unsurety that rules Clarke’s life in between disasters.

Clarke sits back and looks over the sketch, imagining it branded into her flesh forever. It’s a frightening concept, to endure that pain and to bring it on yourself willingly, in order to have something marked into your flesh by your own will. But there’s something exhilarating about it to Clarke as she looks at her design, the scar she would have were she to have any Azgeda scarring done to her. It’s just a daydream, of course, but she still carefully layers a clean sheet of paper on top of the design and sets it aside, preserving it in case…

In case what? She ever wanted to join the Azgeda and mark herself as one of them? Clarke frowns at the paper and leans back in her chair. For the longest time, that had been a thought she couldn’t even entertain, and now, well, she’d just spent an afternoon sketching scars. She could understand what the Azgeda felt when they took up their brands, at least to some extent. How personal the scars may be, how warriors earned them.

“Clarke kom Azgeda,” Clarke whispers the title, rolling it on her tongue. She couldn’t ever take it up, of course, but something about it doesn’t sound entirely terrible. She leans back in her chair with a hum, and tries to recall everything she can about the kru and their citizenship, such as it were. Could people join a kru they hadn’t been born into? Floukru seemed to be made up of nothing but, so Clarke assumes the answer is yes. But would Azgeda accept anyone not raised in their way of life?

Clarke realizes she would have to ask someone to find the answer to the question, and she resolutely pushes the thought aside. She would never be Azgeda, it’s a foolish thought and weighted with far too many consequences. She’s one of Skaikru’s leaders, or was last time she checked, her name and position belongs to them. Even if she wants to become Azgeda - which she stubbornly reminds herself she does not - that choice is not hers to make.

Clarke cleans up her desk and stands, feeling steady on her feet and impossibly restless. She could pace her room as she has every day so far, but something within her resolutely tells her that won’t cut it. Clarke nods and crosses over to her wardrobe, running her fingers over her furs and leathers. She wonders when she collected quite so much of the Azgeda clothing; not that she’s protesting, of course, having a wide selection allows her to actually find something that will work with her injury.

It ends up that Clarke selects a full length gown, rather than the leather pants and fur overcoat she would normally have chosen. It’s far easier to shrug into the heavy black linen, trimmed with grey fur and accented with strips of black leather. She couldn’t even remember where she got the dress, perhaps it was provided as an option for Roan’s coronation ceremony, but she runs her hands over it and approves wholely. It was clearly made for her, and paired with one of her favourite mid weight fur coats she feels she cuts quite a figure, even though her original goal had only been to be dressed in something other than her bed clothes.

Clarke slips her feet into supple leather boots, then hesitates for a moment before strapping her sword around her waist. She doubts that anyone else will make an attempt on her life so soon, but… Well, doubt won’t save her if she’s wrong. She definitely won’t be able to fight anyone for long, but if she stays near the guard-watched halls, she should be able to hold them off until someone can intervene. 

Clarke pats the hilt of her sword and makes a mental vow never to go anywhere without it again, and then sets out from her room into the cold stone halls of the castle. She’s slightly surprised to see two guards outside her door, but she supposes she shouldn’t be. It only made sense to make sure she was safe, she would be far more valuable to Roan now that there was some amount of proof of her powers. As Clarke steps out and turns down one of the halls, the guards fall into step behind her.

Before her run in with Tora, Clarke had been able to walk around with most people ignoring her. Some of them made it very clear that they were ignoring her out of superiority and spite, turning their noses up at her and stalking past, but most of them simply didn’t care. Sure, she was a legend of sorts, but this was the capital of the Ice Nation. Half the people here had titles like hers and stories to go with them, and all of them had better things to do with their time than gawk at some Skaikru girl.

But now, there’s a distinct difference in the looks she gets, and it doesn’t take a genius to notice it. People avert their eyes, out of respect or fear she can’t quite tell. A few mutter ‘wanheda’ beneath their breath, reverent, and Clarke finds herself walking with her back straighter, setting a more leisurely pace than she normally would. When she catches herself doing so, she remembers the last time that she had walked like that. It had been at Roan’s side, walking through crowds of people, being the full embodiment of Wanheda in order to show Roan’s power.

Yet Clarke still feels like herself, this time. Even though everyone is viewing her as Wanheda and she’s walking with that mantle wrapped about her as her furs are, she still feels like herself. Perhaps her and Wanheda are no longer so separate as they had once been, and Clarke finds the concept doesn’t scare her as it might once have. Her actions which had won her the title are hers, she can’t deny that the persona known as “Wanheda” was built from her. They’ve always been one and the same, and Clarke lets that acceptance sink into her as she paces leisurely through the sparsely populated halls.

Clarke reaches an intersection, and knows she has two choices. One, to take the path to the left and head to the far closer throne room. When court was in session, Roan would deliver edicts and rulings to his court, but at other times it was a place for them to socialize, as much as the court ever did so. Their socializing was far more political, a place to make allies and learn about your enemies, and Clarke had been carefully working her way into the hierarchy before her incident. It wouldn’t be a bad idea for her to revisit the scene, carefully curate the rumours undoubtedly spreading about her.

On the other hand, she could go right, and walk further to reach the council chambers. If her estimation of time is right, they should just be meeting now, perhaps partially into the session, but that’s not an issue. The way Clarke sees it, it may actually work in her favour. She could make a dramatic entrance, looking every inch Azgeda as she does right now, and she could shock the opponents of her plan and embolden her allies. The more Clarke thinks of it, of seeing the look on the faces of those who would probably rather she never returned to her seat, the more she yearns to go right.

She knows she shouldn’t return to council yet, she’s not that far along in her recovery, but she resolves to sit next to Bran and let him do all the dramatic gesticulating, and sets her feet to the path. She can’t just sit around all day and let her plans go to waste as people starve. Conviction strengthens her stride, and Clarke becomes more and more firm in her belief that her presence will break the stalemate the council is in.

When she reaches the chamber, Clarke is unsurprised to find the doors closed and two of Roan’s Kingsguard positioned outside. She recognizes one of them vaguely, and the other one she knows very well.

“Arlen,” Clarke acknowledges the man with a quick nod and steps forward to move past him to the door. He steps from his post to stand directly in her way, and Clarke frowns. He doesn’t look her in the eye, simply fixes his eyes straight ahead, ever the dutiful soldier.

“Wanheda.” Arlen adresses her formally, and Clarke narrows her eyes at him, “I can’t let you pass.”

“I just want to attend council, Arlen. I’m not going to get into any fights this time, I promise.” She tries giving him a reassuring smile, but he still stands in her way, expressionless.

“King’s orders, Wanheda.” 

“I know he wants you to protect me, but there’s no risk in there for me, trust me.” Clarke restrains herself from rolling her eyes, and goes to step around Arlen, only for him to place a hand on her shoulder in restraint.

“You’re barred from this and all future meetings of the King’s councils, on the King’s orders. I cannot let you pass.”

Clarke feels the edict like a blow to her stomach, and she simply stares at Arlen in stunned silence for a moment. Was this her punishment, then? He had said there would be none, but Clarke feels as if the world has been stolen from her, her purpose which she was only just finding made void, and she can’t help but equate it to a beating or public humiliation. The shock turns to cold rage seeping through her veins, and Clarke raises her chin.

“I will speak to the King,” she commands Arlen, yet he remains unmoving.

“The King is in council and is not to be disturbed.”

“I am a councillor.” Clarke states. Even when she had just been a figurehead, a political trophy, she had been a councillor. It was part of her title, her purpose, her reason for being in Otta.

“Not anymore, Wanheda.”

“We’ll see about that,” Clarke bites out, and Arlen simply inclines his head in acknowledgment. She turns on her heel and stalks off down now familiar hallways, brushing past nobles and guards alike without paying any of them heed. She can hear her own warrior shadows following her, and the protection that had seemed nothing but wise earlier now irks her. 

Clarke could wait for Roan’s council session - the council session she should be in - to end, approach him afterwards, and sort this out calmly. But Clarke is anything but calm right now, so she storms to Roan’s chambers to wait for him, to confront him with all her fur as soon as he’s out of the public eye. The guards let her in without comment or hesitation, and it only irritates Clarke more that she should have personal access to the King and his belongings, but not to the meetings which had been her purpose.

Clarke paces the length of his room angrily for a while before sitting in one of the chairs in Roan’s room. The burning in her side, only more aggressive given her activity level today, intensifies, and it only serves to fuel Clarke’s rage past the point where she normally would have calmed down. Who was Roan to take this from her? Sure, he was the King and all, but he wasn’t her King. She was a politician in his lands, and a damn good one at that, and she’d be damned if she was going to let that slip through her fingers.

Every time that Clarke can feel herself calming down, she stands and paces Roan’s rooms again. It’s foolish, aggravating her injury like this, but she wants to have all the fury of her own conviction backing her up when she faces him down. Beneath the heat of her passion, there is a core of ice which Clarke knows will allow her to hold to her point, no matter the reasons Roan raises. There aren’t any reasons good enough, at least in Clarke’s mind, for him to have done this to her. Especially given how she had found out. He couldn’t have even come to see her once more, to tell her he was effectively ending the life she had been earning for herself?

When Clarke hears the guards outside his door shift and the door open, she’s seated in his chair again, and Clarke narrows her eyes with deadly malice. She pushes herself to her feet and crosses her arms over her chest, raising her chin at the entryway.

“I’m being barred from council sessions?” Clarke assaults Roan as soon as he enters his chambers, and he starts slightly before running a weary hand through his hair.

“Advisor Clarke, what an unexpected-”

“Don’t bullshit me, Roan. Why did you take me off the council?” Clarke stands from her seat and stalks towards Roan, standing a scant step in front of him. Roan holds her challenging glare for a moment, then brushes past her, their shoulders bumping slightly.

“It was too great of a risk. You can still advise me of course, but council session are off limits.”

Clarke turns sharply and glares at Roan’s back as he stands in the middle of the room, not looking at anything in particular. 

“No, you don’t get to do that. You don’t get to use me as a power piece and then take it all away when I start making a difference with that power.”

“That’s not-”

“You don’t get to invite me to the council, to encourage me to stay and take my place, and then take that away from me, Roan!” Clarke berates over his quiet protest, and Roan turns in a flash, his tired defeat gone.

“You almost died, Clarke!” His voice is a hard whip, and Clarke’s righteous indignation dies in a heartbeat. Roan shakes his head, “If you’re on the council, people will keep coming after you, and it’s not worth the risk.”

Words abandon Clarke at that point. She had thought that he was concerned for his council, or for his people, that she was causing too much discord and the easiest way to calm it was to remove her. But his concern being for her, and for her life…

“I didn’t die,” Clarke says softly, but soundly.

“Clarke,” Roan makes her name a protest on its own.

“I know I came close. Trust me, I know. And I could die next time someone decides they want Wanheda’s power. But I was helping.” It’s almost a plea on Clarke’s tongue. It had been so long since she’d felt she was doing good, and she doesn’t want to lose that. “You can’t tell me I wasn’t helping the people.”

“You were.” Roan moves to his bed and sits on the edge of it, resting his head in his hands, “But they’re not your people, and it’s my fault you almost died for them.”

Clarke’s forehead creases with confusion, and she walks to the bed to sit next to Roan. “How?”

“I made Wanheda real. I needed your power, so I paraded you around and said you were the Commander of Death, and now people believe it. I made you a target.”

Clarke wants to lash out at him, to be offended at the notion that he had built her reputation on his own, but she understands. The guilt of the survivor - or near-survivor, in this case - which distorts reality and accepts only total blame. She doesn’t quite know how to respond, until Roan continues in a strained, exhausted voice.

“I’m releasing you of your obligations to Azgeda. An escort will take you back to Arkadia tomorrow.”

Clarke’s heart stops in her chest. She should be happy at the thought of going back home, but the concept provides her no comfort. In that moment, she realizes that she doesn’t want to lose whatever it is she was so close to building for herself in Otta; the image she built for herself, the reputation she earned, the callouses and scars she fought for. Clarke is faced with the reality that she had begun to carve a home for herself, like a den cut into snow in a blizzard. And she’ll be damned if she lets another home go.

“I refuse,” Clarke states soundly, and Roan raises his head to look at her.

“It’s not safe here,” he insists, and Clarke shakes her head.

“Was it safe when I rode here surrounded by an army that wanted you to kill me? Or when assassins attended all of your speeches? How about when we rode to a village, you fought the leader to the death, and then we got caught in a blizzard?”

“I-” Roan starts, but Clarke cuts him off.

“Safe isn’t an option, Roan. Not for you, and not for me, either. My reputation was solid before you hunted me, and if you hadn’t caught me, someone else would have. Someone still would, in an ambush or a political assassination or some other way, I don’t know. But I know running won’t change a damn thing.”

Roan looks at Clarke like she’s some sort of revelation as she finishes her impromptu speech, and it makes her feel strong. Respected, for her words and for the spine behind them. She softens slightly after a moment and shoots him a rueful smile.

“Besides, pain is the Azgeda way of learning, isn’t it? I’ve never fled from a lesson before.”

“It is.” Roan lets out a breath of air almost like a laugh. “And I’m sure you haven’t.”

A silence stretches between them, not hostile, but not comfortable either, until Clarke breaks it. “So, I’m back on the council?”

“It seems so,” Roan concedes. “Just stay with the guards next time, okay?”

Clarke inclines her head in a slight nod. That had been foolish of her, in retrospect. Even Roan, who is a far better swordsman than Clarke, doesn’t shirk the protection of the guards in Otta.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Don’t forget to cancel that escort,” Clarke states, turning to leave the room.

“You know,” Roan calls after Clarke, and she pauses at his door, “If you ever wanted a place here - among Azgeda - it’s yours.”

Clarke pauses, considers a response, and decides that such a choice is best not made in one day. She simply glances over her shoulder at Roan, catching his eye, and nods her head once, slowly. For now, that would be enough.

That night, Clarke dreams of the first time she’d seen snowfall. She plays in the fresh powder, and nothing corrupts it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's not six months this time, rejoice!! Things are going to happen soon, I swear. I've got big plans for the next chapter, the end of it is going to be fun and maybe going to get me yelled at. Oh! Also! I now know that this will be 12 chapters long, barring any major plot revisions :)
> 
> Anyway, [coldsaturn](http://coldsaturn.tumblr.com) sifted through this whole document, much of which was written offline and without spell check, so y'all should send her love. She also saved you from the frownpocalypse. Seriously, Roan frowned so much.
> 
> If you want to cry over Roarke, come chat with me [on tumblr!](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com) And thanks in advance for commenting/reading/leaving kudos <3 This beast is more than halfway done and you guys have made it so worth it.


	7. Seven

Clarke had known things would change when she returned to the council. Hell, she’d been praying for it, they needed the change in order to get the games going. But as she steps into the council chamber for the first time since the attack, she’s faced with exactly how much her “victory” changed things. Everyone in the room stops talking and looks up at her, the way they only ever do for Roan, and Clarke is very glad she decided to wear formal clothing.

“Councillors,” Clarke says in greeting to the silent room, unsure of what else to do as she crosses to her seat. That seems to break the spell, and talk resumes once more, leaving Clarke feeling entirely odd as she settles herself next to Bran.

“You’re a sight for sore eyes.” Bran claps Clarke on the shoulder, and she spares him a small smile, however strained.

“I wonder if everyone feels the same.” Clarke is careful to keep her voice quiet, not to let others who might use it against her hear her insecurities.

“Ah, enough do, and don’t you worry about the rest. None of them’ll be trying anything so brash again.” Bran gives Clarke a warm smile, but she brushes off the words of comfort with a shake of her head.

“I’m not concerned about that. What if they try to stall the games more?” Clarke knows she probably should be more concerned for her own life, but honestly all she can think of is people starving in the streets because a decision can’t be reached in the nice warm council chamber.

“You’re here now,” Bran offers as a form of answer, continuing at Clarke’s confused look. “Un-stall it.”

Clarke opens her mouth to explain that it’s not quite that simple, but the doors to the chamber open once more, and silence takes over the room as everyone stands in the presence of their King. Clarke is quick to follow suit, and she doesn’t miss the small nod Roan gives her as he passes her to his own seat at the head of the table. She takes what solace in it she can; she has Roan and Bran on her side, and hopefully that will be enough.

Clarke thinks of Tabbi, with her ferocity and her gang of children, and stands taller. She’ll make sure it is.

“Well,” Roan says as he sits, reclining in a way that seems more predatory than relaxed, “shall we call the meeting to order?”

The councillors answer by way of taking their seats again, but none of them speak as Roan looks around the table, and Clarke is struck by the change from a few weeks ago. By now, all of them would have been clamouring to have their issue heard first, attended to with the utmost importance. But now… Roan attention settles on Clarke, along with the attention of the council as a whole.

Clarke takes in a deep breath, calm and steady, and she knows that this is her purpose. It hasn’t always been, and it might not be forever, but for this winter, this is where she needs to live. In politics, in power plays and mind games and a culture not nearly as foreign as it once had seemed. Clarke raises her chin and takes a moment to meet each of the councillors’ eyes; friends, foes, and those undecided.

“I hear that the Azgeda people are starving in the streets,” Clarke begins carefully, “but before my… absence, we had a solution in place. Did we not?”

“You had suggested-” 

“The King had made his decision,” Clarke cuts off the man who had started speaking, not allowing him to get his doubtlessly dramatic rant started. He gapes at her like a fish, and Clarke presses on. “The duty of the council is to advise the King to make the choices best suited for his people, is it not? And then to assist him in carrying out those decisions?”

“Well, yes, but-” A woman this time, and one Clarke doesn’t recognize. Possibly Tora’s replacement, Clarke makes a note to learn everything she can about her as soon as possible.

“Then tell me why his people are dying while you all do your best to prevent him from helping them? I know the food for the games is here, stockpiled, just waiting for things to move forward. And yet still you all want to stand your ground, as if the snow is going to be impressed and call a retreat.” No few of the gathered officials look ashamed at that, and Clarke is careful not to show how thrilled she is over that small victory. “The facts are that your people are dying, your King is able to help them, and you all are barring the way.”

“Games like this are not so simple, Wanheda,” the woman speaks again, and Clarke nods slowly. This, she can work with. It’s not a blatant refusal to listen, it’s not a rejection of her statement, and there’s a certain respect to it with the use of her title.

“Then we had better get working, if we hope to have any people left to fight in them,” Clarke says, and from the corner of her eye she catches Roan smile; small and gone in a flash, but definitely there. Clarke’s spirits soar at that, and the attention on her suddenly feels far more powerful than oppressive. 

“Where do we start?” Bran asks, and no one tries to stop Clarke from giving them a starting point, from actually going ahead with the planning. Perhaps her words broke through to them, or maybe they’re just afraid of her power, confirmed in her killing Tora. Regardless of the reasoning, Clarke is willing to work with it.

“We start with what’s most important. The people.” It won’t hurt her case to beat them over the head with the fact that these are human lives they’re talking about, the lives of the very people they’re in this room in their fancy clothes representing. “Who competes, and where.” Clarke looks around the room and frowns at their silence, “Well, suggestions?”

“No one with a scar should be excluded-” One advisor starts, before another cuts him off.

“If you want the games to last until next winter, sure,” The interruptor scoffs. Clarke nods sagely, glowing with joy on the inside. They’re listening to her, and they’re actually working on moving things forward, in a ponderously slow fashion, but at least the first suggestion had been a step in the right direction.

“It would take too long to see every warrior fight in them. After all, who among Azgeda isn’t a warrior to be reckoned with?” Blatant flattery, but many of the advisors puff themselves up with pride at Clarke’s words. She pauses in thought for a moment before throwing an idea out to the room. “What about one warrior for each family in any given village?”

“So only one of each family may eat? Husbands and wives will slaughter each other for the right to compete.” Eyr shakes his head, looking down on Clarke as he always does, and she very carefully steps on Bran’s foot as she notices Bran’s hand fall to the hilt of his sword. If for no other reason, Clarke can be certain of Bran’s allegiance to her just to piss of Eyr, it seems.

“King Roan, would there be enough for each warrior to share with their family?” Clarke asks, turning to face Roan. He has the fingers of one hand curled in front of his mouth, slightly obscuring his expressions and making him more difficult to read. It’s not hard for Clarke to see to approval in his eyes when he meets her gaze, though.

“There may be, if they ration it strictly.” Roan’s response is vague and perfect. Clarke appreciates that he’s not avidly in favour of the plan, it would only spread rumours and hurt her footing in the court.

“Surely your people are not so bloodthirsty to kill each other in order to avoid the hardship of rationing, Advisor Eyr?” Clarke poses the question to the room in general, before slowly turning to face the flustered councilman. Eyr is definitely going to hate her for this, but she needs to show her willingness to talk back in order to prevent men like Eyr from looking down on her or talking over her. Apparently killing someone isn’t enough for some folks. Clarke adds one more jab as Eyr sputters around words, “Even Skaikru is able to ration, we did so for generations without resorting to killing each other.”

“Well obviously we can handle it.” Eyr huffs, voice slightly higher in embarrassment, and Clarke inclines her head towards him.

“Good then. Each family may send one warrior to represent them, who will compete and earn a strict ration of food. Victors will receive a more generous portion. Agreed?” Clarke looks around the room and makes eye contact with each advisor as a general chorus of ‘aye’ rings through the room. A few don’t give assent, but they don’t reject her proposal, so she simply makes a mental note of them and moves on.

_Was that really so hard?_ Clarke sighs internally. Perhaps there just needed to be someone with her exact vision here to move things along, or perhaps she really does have some sort of power. Regardless, she’s grateful at least one decision has been made, and simultaneously frustrated at the fact that it wasn’t made before now.

“You don’t expect us to hold a games in every village, right?” One of the younger girls on the council asks. 

“Of course not.” Clarke had thought this through, marked down plan after plan for the games so that one of them might get the approval of the council. Her predictions for what they would need to know and how they would react are coming scarily close to her final draft. Recovering may have been boring, but it gave her time to think, and she’s able to admit she understands the council better than she ever would have thought possible. “Each major town, which has a representative on the council, should host a set of games. The villages and outposts in each region can be divided between those councillors, and resources sent accordingly. I trust you all know the people you represent better than I do.”

Clarke notes a few smiles at that, and she sees in the advisors some of that love she’d seen in Roan when they’d first come in view of Otta. One of the lake representatives is apparently so eager to show their knowledge, they immediately start on the division of settlements with another. Within moments, every regional advisor is working on what Clarke had suggested, and a general clamour fills the room. She can’t hear the details of anything being said, and Clarke allows herself a small smile. Maybe it’s a dirty trick to pit them against each other and their local pride, but it’s definitely working.

As non-regional advisors join in on the clamour, weighing in as either impartial judges or in favour of their friends and allies, Clarke catches Roan watching her out of the corner of her eye. He grants her a small, victorious smile amidst the distraction, and Clarke’s heart swells. She tells herself it’s just pride in doing a good job, and her general need for approval. But a little voice insists on telling her it’s more specifically because the grin was a sign of Roan’s approval. Before Clarke can dwell on that too much, Roan calls out into the clamour and silences to council.

“Your council has been heard,” Roan says gruffly, “and I believe there is nothing more of importance to be said. Since objections seem to be a thing of the past, decide on the hosting cities and division of population by tonight and inform me. I will finalize the details and notify you all of your roles to play before the day of the games. In the meantime, get some rest, send word to your people. The games begin in seven days.”

Clarke is fairly certain, as the councillors leave the chamber in clusters based on their regions, she’s witnessed a miracle. There were no fights, hardly any shouting, and she actually managed to convince Azgeda warriors to do something that not all of them wanted to do. Sure, it helps having the king on your side, but Clarke can’t help but be momentarily stunned at the success of the meeting.

“So,” Roan speaks into the silence that falls after the last advisor left. Clarke realizes that she’s still standing as if she’s giving a grand speech, and Roan is still sitting in his chair and regarding her carefully. But there’s a bit more of mischief to his eyes, now that they’re alone, and a slightly curl to the edge of his lips. “You’ve done the easy part.”

“That was the easy part?” Clarke raises her eyebrows, looking at the door everyone left through. “Then why didn’t you do it earlier?”

Roan shrugs as he stands, crossing the room to lean on the table next to Clarke. There was a time she would have found it disconcerting to be this close to him, but now it’s almost comforting. No, not almost. Clarke definitely is comfortable around him, in fact she actually enjoys his presence.

“You wouldn’t have thanked me for it,” Roan says, and Clarke frowns as way of response. He’s right, of course, but that doesn’t mean she has to be happy with that response.

“Anyway,” Clarke pushes past his comment without acknowledging it further, “if that was the easy part, what’s the hard part?”

“Logistics, bureaucracy, requisitions, and paperwork.” Roan places a hand on Clarke’s shoulder as he goes to walk past her, “Rest well tonight, because tomorrow we plan a war without bloodshed.”

`

Seven days, Clarke decides on the third day, is not nearly enough time and far too long all at once. Reports trickle in, body counts rising and increasing rates of crime in further settlements hit harder by the snowfall, but also of preparations underway. There seems to be a never ending supply of problems to deal with, and every time Clarke thinks she has a solution, Roan is there to tear in apart. To be fair, she does the same for him. If they’re able to figure out issues with something, the advisors and Azgeda opposing the games definitely would.

On the first day, Clarke and Roan had met for a few hours, taken breaks in order to spar and allow their minds to relax, and then retired to their own rooms late at night. On the second day, Clarke’s heart climbed into her throat and stayed there on a wave of anxiety. They had not accomplished nearly enough, and so the breaks stopped. She only retired to her own room for a few hours, and even that she did begrudgingly.

Now, however, a large amount of the work is done. Not close to all, or even half, but enough that Clarke can breathe a little easier. And perhaps that is a mistake, because without so much pressure forcing her to perform, Clarke finds herself yawning over proposed rules, eyes sliding over words that fail to provide any real meaning to her mind. She still needs to figure out the whole opening ceremony, draft speeches for each of the regions, rework and rework and rework those speeches until they don’t resemble her original words at all, and probably do a million and one other things.

Clarke leans her head forward, gently massaging her temples against the pulsing of the exhaustion headache behind them. Her mind wanders from list of things to do almost immediately, too tired to think straight, and she yawns as her gaze skips around the room. At one point she may have found the concept of an Azgeda room - with all its fur and bone sculptures, being comforting ridiculous - but now… Clarke feels entirely content as her attention slides easily over the furnishings.

In the end, she finds herself staring at the only truly dynamic thing in the room; Roan, hunched over his desk with a frown of concentration pulling at the corners of his lips, working steadily. Clarke can’t help but smile a little, a warm glow of accomplishment rushing through her. This is the scene of her plan coming into fruition, her and a king working side by side to feed a starving people. Clarke allows herself to bask in the pleasant feeling for a while, letting it relax some of the tension of actually working on the plan.

She fully intends to go back to her own documents, all of them of the utmost importance, but she could swear that her very bones are exhausted, and she can’t seem to find it in herself to look away from Roan and lean over to the pile of forms on the table. Instead she slumps further down on the sinfully comfortable couch, which has never felt half as lovely as it does now, propping herself up on one arm of it. She knows in that moment her battle against sleep is lost, and she gives up on work for the night with a sigh.

Roan looks up from his papers at the soft noise, bestowing a bemused smile on Clarke. “Giving up already?”

“Tactical retreat,” Clarke responds with a smile of her own, and Roan nods.

“Not the worst idea. There never seems to be an end to paperwork with these games.” Roan grumbles, setting down his charcoal and stretching his arms above his head with a groan as tired joint crack and pop. The edges of his scars peek out from his shirt at the action, and Clarke’s eyes latch onto them.

“Hey, Roan?” Clarke asks as he readies himself to go back to work, apparently not prepared to call it a night himself, yet. He gives a prompting hum, his back still to Clarke as he looks over a paper. “Can I see the scars on your back?”

A sudden tension sets into his frame as all of his small motions still, and were Clarke not so tired, she’d feel bad for it. As is, she feels only a vague hint of guilt which prompts her to add, “Only if you’re okay with it, of course.”

Roan is frozen for another moment before he turns and looks at Clarke, regarding her carefully. “Why?”

Clarke weighs her answer carefully. She knows the scar is very personal to him, at least the meaning of it, so she doesn’t feel she can simply say she’s trying to understand the story it tells. Well, maybe she could, but she doesn’t want him to feel pressured to share that with her if he doesn’t want to.

“I designed one for myself. For this.” Clarke taps her side above the angry scar from her fight, concealed beneath her shirt. “And I suppose… I’m curious. I can’t remember what yours looked like clearly.”

Roan looks at Clarke for a few more seconds before pushing his chair back and standing, his back to Clarke. He removes his shirt in silence, and Clarke feels almost a sort of reverence about the revelation of the scar. She had never seen it like this, in the soft light of candles and the darkness of night creeping into the edges of the room. It seems so different, without the taste of blood in her mouth and hatred burning in her spirit.

Roan’s shirt falls to the floor, and Clarke stands, exhaustion momentarily set aside by curiosity. Silence reigns in the room as she crosses to him slowly. Perhaps she’s going too far, but surely he’ll stop her before she crosses any of his personal lines. He doesn’t tell her to back off, simply shifts his head slightly to the side, not quite watching her but definitely listening to her movements, being acutely aware of her. Clarke pauses behind him and though her fingers long to trace the lines of the scar, she keeps her hands at her sides.

When she’d first seen the scar, Clarke had been more horrified by it than anything. After all, to willingly mar one’s flesh like that, to that extent, it wasn’t a concept she could quite reconcile at the time. But now she sees them as no different than the tattoos the other kru bear, simply a way of claiming your flesh as your own, of showing something important to the world. 

Clarke drags her eyes over the gentle curves and whorls, reminiscent of wings, and somehow also making her think of trees. There’s something organic and soft to the design, yet the scars themselves make it hard and strong. She can imagine a story, now that she knows her own scar, but she has no idea if it’s right. It doesn’t matter, anyway, what the tale behind it is. What matters is that Roan trusted her to show her in this context, to share something like this with her. It fills Clarke with a sort of confidence, and she smiles.

“Thank you, Roan,” Clarke says softly, turning and walking back to the couch.

“Any time,” Roan responds with a grunt, retrieving his shirt from the floor. Clarke is suddenly very glad for the fact that his back is to her, because she can’t help but watch the way his muscles move, the strength evident in every line of his torso. She’s seen him shirtless many times before, but never in such safety and calm, and never when lack of sleep is already uninhibiting her mind. With great effort, she tears her gaze away from him and back to the papers she had said she was going to give up on, trying to cash in on the small amount of energy she now has. 

“Do we really need a full speech and ceremony?” Clarke asks, in an attempt to dispel the tension within herself, or perhaps within the room. For some reason the pages she’d just finished writing less than an hour ago all seem suddenly unnecessary.

“For which settlements?” Roan asks, and Clarke scrambles through a sheaf of papers to find a list of every approved hosting city or village. She scans down the list, trying to recall any information to see ones they can cut the speeches for, but her brain stubbornly refuses.

“Any of them?” Clarke asks, hopefully. It would be so much easier just to let the warriors fight. The easiest would be to just give them the food, but that ship sank before it even left the harbour.

Roan chuckles, “Yes, we do need to prepare speeches and ceremonies for at least some of the games. Let me see that list.”

Clarke crosses the room again with the paper in hand and leans on the desk next to Roan as he looks over it with a frown. She tries to see what he can see, makes guesses as to which places he’ll determine can be left with a more simplified tournament. In the end, he puts marks next to three of the places she had guessed, and one she hadn’t; Otta.

“They don’t need anything too fancy here. Speeches, all of that, they get it frequently enough. The ceremonies are to make the outer settlements feel like they’re valued, that we think about them even in the capital. The people here won’t care about the speeches, and they’ll make most of their own entertainment with the games as an excuse,” Roan explains as he taps his charcoal next to the city's name; perhaps answering Clarke’s unasked question, or perhaps simply making his justifications aloud to see if they make sense. Clarke nods in silent agreement, and Roan continues, “I’ll say a few words, but that should be good enough here.”

“Want me to write them for you?” Clarke offers, looking over the work Roan already has spread in front of him. Royal decrees and requisitions, labour mandates, all things that the king himself must see to. 

“Sounds good,” Roan says, handing the list back to Clarke, mind clearly already onto the next task as he reaches for a new form to deal with. Clarke pats his shoulder in solidarity and returns to the couch, setting up fresh sheets of paper and discarding half finished ceremonies and speeches for the settlements no longer receiving them.

They would need to say something to start the games, of course. But no big speeches, Clarke starts drafting short introductions for the heads of those villages to say. Honestly, the words hardly mean anything to her at this point after three days of writing, but she pens in something about bravery and strength and trusts the respectives leaders to modify it as they see fit. Perhaps trusting them is a risky move, but none of them know that she’s the one who wrote the speeches. She adds them to the pile of forms she has for Roan to sign; they decided early on it would be easier if everything looked like it came directly from his hand.

And now, for Otta… Clarke taps her charcoal absently, trying to think of something short and poignant for Roan to say. She knows what she would say, but a speech by a King would have to be something more than that, even simplified. The blank page taunts her, and Clarke’s headache returns with a resounding vengeance as minutes tick by. Clarke bites her lower lip and tries to focus.

_People of Otta_ , Clarke starts to write, frowning deeply and crossing it out. 

_Noble warriors of Otta_ \- perhaps a little cheesy, but the Azgeda aren’t above small flattery - _it is my honour as King to introduce the tournament. We gather today to fight for survival, to show our skills and be rewarded for bravery in the ring. You all know the rules and the prizes, so, let the fights begin._

It’s short, which was Clarke’s goal, but she can imagine Roan saying the words to his people. He’ll go off script at least a little, of course, but that’s built into each of the ceremonies, the opportunity for adaptation. Clarke worries her lower lip and tries to come up with other variations; more sincere, more stern, more of something and more of everything. Clarke sets aside the speech with a strangled sigh, realizing that by agonizing over the short speech so much, she effectively negated the whole point of shortening it in the first place.

“I’m sleeping here tonight,” Clarke announces, moving paperwork off of the couch in order to stretch out. Weariness is in her very bones and she swears her teeth ache with the pulsing in her head. She could maybe make it back to her room, but it seems so very far away, and this couch is fit for a king, after all. Roan simply grunts in response, and not for the first time, Clarke admires his ability to work harder and longer than anyone else. 

As soon as Clarke closes her eyes, she falls into a deep sleep, soundtracked by the gentle scraping of Roan’s charcoal on paper.

`

The sound of a door closing wakes Clarke with a start, and she sits bolt upright, hand going for the knife strapped to her ankle. She’s confused only for a moment until she takes in the unending sea of documents and remembers where she slept last night. She exhales slowly and looks to the doors, seeing Roan trudge in, looking entirely exhausted. 

“What’s going on?” Clarke asks, sliding her knife back into its concealed sheath. She wonders if she should be concerned that she didn’t even fully draw it on instinct; is it a good thing or a bad thing for her to sleep more securely? Surely it’s not bad to be safe, but she shouldn’t count on safety too much. If being on Earth has taught her anything, it’s taught her that much.

“Nothing much, just meeting with the advisors to hand out information. Most of them leave today,” Roan explains, and Clarke counts up the days. It seems so early for that, and like they haven’t accomplished nearly enough, but she realizes there’s only today, one more day of finalizing preparations, and then the games begin. A thrill races through her - not entirely at the thought of being done with paperwork, although that is a bonus - but the continued strain evident on Roan’s features puts a damper on it.

“What’s really going on?” Clarke insists with a frown. “Tell me, Roan. We’re in this together.”

Roan sighs, running a hand through his hair. “It’s Taka. He’s going along with the games, but he won’t stop telling me how his people will hate it. They're not fond of “Otta trends” as he calls them. It’s not a big deal, but...” 

Clarke hums and chews on her lower lip in thought. Surely, compared to every difficulty and hurdle they’ve overcome so far, this problem is nothing. They could just ignore it, honestly, or… A solution presents itself to Clarke handily. “Then go there.” 

“What?” Roan’s brow furrows as he turns to look at Clarke.

“If you go to his settlement, it’ll show them that it’s not a trend, right? Remind them their King cares about all of his subjects.” Clarke shrugs, “It wouldn’t hurt, anyway.”

“It could be dangerous, but-” 

“Are you backing down from danger?” Clarke teases, and she’s a little surprised to see Roan laugh in response.

“No, I suppose not. It’s a good idea, thank you, Clarke.” Roan looks at her in a way that holds far too much weight for Clarke to handle right now, so she looks away and clears her throat.

“Of course. You’ll have to leave someone in charge here though,” Clarke points out, and Roan waves a hand at the concept.

“Oh, easily done.”

Clarke tries to think of who Roan would leave in charge. There are many higher advisors, highly respected among the people, but they might not be too happy about the job. And everyone firmly in favour of the games isn’t the greatest champion, to be met with a positive reception when making speeches.

“I’ll leave you in charge,” Roan states simply, as if such a thing is easy, and not potentially a colossal mistake. At once, Clarke is both thrilled at the potential and the accomplishment, and fervently against the idea.

“I can think of a lot of people who wouldn’t like that,” Clarke says cautiously. It’s not that she wouldn’t love to be in charge of the tournament here, but it’s probably not a good idea. She’s not Azgeda, she’s just a foreign advisor, and there are going to be a lot of warriors all amped for battle when she steps up to open the games.

“What, backing down from danger?” Roan cocks an eyebrow at her, and Clarke finds herself smiling despite herself. Sure, it’s maybe a mistake, but she wouldn’t be able to watch anyone else launch her games if it couldn’t be Roan.

“I suppose a lot of people already don’t like me.” Clarke shrugs.

“That’s the spirit,” Roan says with a dry chuckle, before leveling Clarke with another one of those intense looks, “You’ll do great, Clarke.”

This time, Clarke doesn’t shy away. She holds his gaze and finds something within herself glowing with the praise and the attention. “Thank you, Roan.”

“Don’t thank me too much.” Roan breaks the moment, picking up a stack of papers and crossing the room, taking a seat next to her. “This tournament is yours now, so you need to learn all of this inside and out.”

Clarke looks at the papers Roan holds out to her and sighs, “But I wrote all of those, surely I know them well enough.” 

“Do you really think that?” Roan asks, and Clarke curses him silently for knowing her so well as she takes the sheets.

“As always, the King is right,” Clarke mocks, and Roan good naturedly shoves her shoulder with his own as she shifts her attention to the introduction and schedules in her hands. “I’ll need to change some of this.”

“Change whatever you want. I trust you,” Roan says, standing from the couch and crossing to his wardrobe. “And now, I suppose I need to pack.”

Clarke acknowledges him with a hum, slipping into the routine of studying quite easily as Roan busies himself digging out bags and clothing. He was right, of course, although Clarke knew the general structure of the games for Otta quite well, she’d lost the details while planning every other aspect. It’s not hard for her to memorize what she needs to, which is good, because by the time she feels comfortable with the subject matter, she finds herself stifling yawns. Too many long nights with not enough sleep, it has a way of catching up with her as soon as the pressure is lighter.

Clarke shakes her head and refocuses, picking up charcoal and making light notes. The simplified speech she wrote for Roan won’t work for her. The Azgeda warriors won’t believe the same words from her that they would from Roan, so she must leave most of the morale building up to them. She knows they’ll manage, the way that warriors bond on the battlefield, all she needs to do is provide them with a framework in which to do so.

Details are checked and rechecked as Clarke’s eyes grow ever heavier. With a heavy sigh, she relinquishes her battle against slumber and carefully sets aside the papers. It won’t do for her to be falling asleep on her feet at the games, so she stretches out on the couch for a little cat nap. Sleep swarms over her quickly, but not before a strange little thought tickles her mind, of how comfortable she must be around Roan to sleep this easily. 

Any attempts to pursue that thought are cut off by the unrelenting exhaustion, and Clarke falls asleep to the gentle sounds of Roan packing.

-

“Clarke.” A rough voice gently calls Clarke from her slumber, and she wakes easily. Months ago she would have woken in full attack mode, but she knows the voice, and the soft touch on her shoulder.

“What’s up?” She asks, voice slow with residual sleep.

“I’m leaving for Ryon. I’ll be back in three days.” Roan drops his hand from Clarke’s shoulder as she sits up with a leisurely stretch.

“Of course, yeah, I’ll head back to my room.” Clarke shakes off the last of her sleep - which perhaps ended up being more than the power nap she had planned - and goes to stand, but Roan shakes his head.

“Don’t worry about it, I just wanted to let you know. Get your rest, you have your own ceremony to finalize in the morning.”

Clarke thinks of all the things that she has to do once the sun rises and finds herself smiling. It’s a ridiculous amount of work, but it’s work she wants to do, tasks that will validate her ideas and bring them into reality. Roan raises a brow and regards her curiously for a moment before echoing her with a ghost of a smile.

“Big days coming up.” Clarke observes, as way of explanation, and Roan nods. “You should get going, we’ll be fine here.”

“I know you will, I’ve left my most trusted advisor in charge.” The open sincerity in Roan’s voice affects Clarke in ways she didn’t expect. Her heart swells with pride and something else causes a thrill of nerves to race through her, and heat to flood her cheeks. For the first time, she notices how close he is to her, crouched next to the couch she had dozed off on, and her eyes flicker to his lips.

Clarke fully expects Roan to turn and leave, giving her time to sort out exactly what his words and her reaction to them mean, but he doesn’t right away. He watches her, carefully measuring the moment, and Clarke is thankful for the dim light hiding her blush. She doesn’t know why this feels so different from normal, so much more intimate. She’s frozen with the intensity of it, unable to move or say anything to break it.

Roan, however, isn’t struck by the same paralysis. After a few seconds that feel like eons, he leans in and presses his lips to Clarke’s. It’s the lightest kiss, a bare brush of lips and a hint of stubble, and Clarke has no idea what to do about it. Her mind races in a million directions at once, still far too asleep to figure this out, and long before she knows what she wants to do, Roan pulls away.

“Sorry, I’ll-” Roan clears his throat awkwardly and stands in a hurry. “Good luck with the ceremony, advisor.”

Clarke is thrown, both by the kiss and by Roan’s sudden formality, so all she can think to say in response is, “Of course, King Roan.” That seems to be enough for Roan, as he practically runs from the room, leaving Clarke entirely confused and flustered.

Clarke raises her hand to her lips slowly and for a heartbeat convinces herself it was a dream before reality tells her otherwise. Roan kissed her, and she’s going to have to figure out what that means, or at least what she wants it to mean. But not now. God, why did he have to do this now? There’s too much happening, she doesn’t have the time to figure out her feelings for him. Or his feelings for her. How do the Azgeda even do relationships, anyway?

Clarke shakes her head to stop her thoughts before they can run away from her. None of that matters, only the games matter. Whatever just happened, she can figure it out after the ceremony. After the ceremony, when she has to run the logistics of the games and prize distribution for the largest settlement in Azgeda territory. And navigate the political waters that either success or failure will bring. On second thought, maybe she doesn’t need to figure it out that badly, perhaps they can just move past this like nothing happened.

The thought of ignoring the situation entirely settles unhappily in Clarke stomach, resolutely informing her that she will do no such thing. Clarke throws off her furs with a sigh, getting to her feet despite the early hour. Had Roan not kissed her, she might have slept more, but now… Well, the past is the past, all she can do is look to the future. And right now, as Clarke crosses the room to the stack of papers with her speech and officiating duties in it, her future carries a great weight.

Combing over the now familiar words she’ll deliver to the masses settles Clarke’s mind. She refamiliarizes herself with every step of the opening ceremony, every detail of the games, every rule and stipulation - of which there aren’t many, because it would be pointless to try to enforce too many rules on Azgeda warriors. She finds small loopholes, because there will always be some, but nothing major enough to force a last minute revision. 

Fully distracted, but now also fully awake, Clarke slips out of Roan’s quarters to go inspect the tournament grounds. It’s really just the field in front of the castle, with quickly constructed stands to allow spectators, but even this long before sunrise, it’s bustling with activity. Clarke checks in with every foreman, and then several of their underlings, making sure everything is going according to plan. Today is the last day the have to work, and of course everyone is behind schedule but none so drastically that they tell her that, so Clarke leaves them to their tasks.

She walks to the middle of the vague ring, in which the fights will take place. It will be all out brawls, any weapon allowed so long as it isn’t being used with the intent to kill or cripple opponents. Blades will be blunted, and contestants have to respond to calls by the judges or risk their rewards being forfeit. Still, the fights carry a high risk of lethality, and Clarke looks at the snow, seeing in her memory the way that blood melts it and dyes it. A part of her wishes there were another way, but she finds that part of her is far, far quieter than it used to be. This is their culture, it is their way, and Clarke is more okay with it than she thought she would ever be. If all goes according to plan, no one will die, be it from the games or starvation.

The world gets brighter in a hurry as the sun rises, dispersed by clouds but causing the snow to glow all the same. Clarke takes in the sight of it all, without her vision being limited by torchlight. Around her, workers are clearing the snow within the ring, a not insignificant task given how much has fallen since the first snowfall. It sets the grounds for the fight even further apart from the stands, and Clarke is reminded of Roman Coliseums. This is nothing quite so fancy and polished, and none of the contestants will be slaves, but the comparison is still strong.

Clarke looks out beyond the hustle and bustle of men and women hard at work and sees the drift of snow crowding the side of buildings in Otta, taller than her by far. She can’t see anyone in the city from this vantage point, but she knows they’re there, trudging through snow and stubbornly packing it down beneath their feet, going about their business as if this were a day like any other. There’s a grit and grim determination to Azgeda life that demands a certain amount of respect, and Clarke can only hope that her words will hold up to it.

“Noble warriors,” Clarke breathes the words softly into the frozen air, weighing them as they hang in a thick white cloud. “I am not Azgeda. These games are not Azgeda. But I have learned things in my time here. I have learned the language, and with it, I have learned some of the will of the Azgeda. I give these games to you as a chance to prove your bravery and strength, your will in the face of adversity, your ability to take something so foreign and to make it yours with blood and sweat. When the first of you take to these grounds, these games will no longer be mine. They will belong to you, to the great people of the North, and I trust that you will make them something greater than I could have ever imagined.”

Clarke looks out at the empty stands and imagines them full. She can already see some vendors trekking up from Otta, to set up stands for hot food and drink - far more of the latter than the former- and perhaps for furs and some novelties as well. She wonders at the crowds they’ll draw, tries to imagine people cheering in the stands and churning the snow in the fields underfoot in their celebrations. The Azgeda are normally a reserved people, but she knows full well how they love a good fight, and she’s planned two full days of mock warfare for them.

Clarke closes her eyes and tries to envision them reacting to her speech, tries to feel how her words will be received. She thinks she has some concept of it, but tries not to let herself get carried away. Only time will tell how the games will proceed, and if she’s picked the right words in the end.

It turns out, when the next day dawns blindingly bright, that Clarke was not at all prepared. The stands aren’t close to big enough, warriors of all shapes and sizes spilling out into the fields around the castle, their simple conversations a roar akin to the ocean itself. They cheer when she walks through the crowd, planning to get there before anyone else, but not counting on their desire to start the festivities the night before any official events occurred. Her words, when she speaks them with a voice that thankfully doesn’t shake, are met with the sounds of thunder, fierce pride so evident on every face that it takes Clarke’s breath away for a moment. This was her vision, and in that moment, these are her people. She gave this to them, and they accepted it - hell, they accepted _her_.

“Warriors, to your marks!” Clarke’s voice barely carries above the sounds of the crowd, but the first two competitors hear her and take to the ring, turning to shout at the crowds, amping themselves and the audience up. Clarke finds herself wanting to cheer to, but barely restrains herself as she makes for the sidelines.

The games, once launched, had been designed by Clarke and Roan to run themselves in most cities. Roan will have to remain for the duration of the games in Ryon, as a gesture of political goodwill, but that’s not the case for Otta. Clarke stays just long enough to watch the first few battles, spectacularly bloody considering all the weapons are blunted and anyone who attempts to cause grievous harm would be barred. She makes sure the judges for the fights are watching sharply, weighs their rulings and finds that they are being honest enough for her liking. Obviously there is some bias, but that’s why there’s no one person in charge of ruling victors.

Content with their function, Clarke leaves the fights to people who are far more suited to the task than her, retreating to the castle from the bitter cold. She’s not quite the last of the council and court to leave the games, but enough have that the halls are busy, warm from the heat of people bustling about. Clarke searches the people she passes, trying to see in their state of being how her games are received. She told herself she was prepared for anything, from riots to grudging acceptance to a full success, but a sort of confusion settles into her as she sees more and more members of the court.

They all seem… happy? Even people who fought against her ideas smile and laugh with companions in ways she’s never seen. There’s a great deal of revelry at the tournament grounds themselves, but Clarke hadn’t expected that to spread into the castle. After all, everyone within these walls hasn’t had to struggle at all in the winter, this isn’t saving them in any way.

“Wanheda,” a voice calls out to Clarke, and she turns to face Onto. She remembers all too well him drawing his blades on her when the games had first been suggested, but she doesn’t feel trepidation at his approach as she once might have. If he attacks her now, she has her sword at her hip, and she damn well know how to use it. He stops a few paces from her and clears his throat, “Your idea didn’t turn out too bad.”

Clarke grins hugely on the inside, although she restrains her actual expression to a small smile. She knows that among the court, that slightly awkward admission is as close as she’ll ever get to an apology, and she counts it as a huge personal win. “Thank you, advisor. I hope you enjoy the games.”

Onto simply grunts and stalks off, his entourage following him. For all his young age, he’s respected by a large part of the court, enough for him to constantly have at least a few warriors fawning over him. Clarke watches them go, a deep pride warming her soul, and it doesn’t escape her notice that even Onto seems to be affected by the good humour of the day, trading a joke with one of his group.

Clarke makes her way through the stone hallways with a smile on her face and her head held high. People nod to her in passing, and a few give her brief congratulations. Although there are some who seem offended by all the fun and obstinately remain scowling about their business, the overwhelming atmosphere is one of levity. The castle has never seemed so welcoming to her as in this moment, and the path she treads feels familiar in a way that resonates comfortably within her.

Before Clarke reaches her destination of the throne room, where she imagines much of the court will be gathered and her appearance would go a long way to helping her image, she can hear a very familiar voice sounding out with raucous laughter. She shakes her head fondly and walks into the room, pausing just inside the doors long enough for people to take notice of her, including the ever joyous Bran.

“Clarke!” His voice thunders, and Clarke wonders exactly how many drinks he’s had already. Although, looking around at the slightly flushed cheeks and giggling spread through all of the court gathered in the room, Clarke imagines he’s not alone in indulging today. Bran approaches her with a toothy grin and throws an arm around her shoulder, appearances and posturing be damned. “You’ve done amazing work!”

Clarke laughs as he leads her across the room, back towards the throne and the group of her most fervent supporters. “And you seem to be doing good work keeping the brewers fed this winter.”

“But of course, I am a humble servant of the people.” Bran drops his arm from Clarke’s shoulder to perform an elaborate mock-bow, snagging a drink from one of the servers and handing it to her with a surprising amount of grace for such a large drunkard.

Clarke takes a sip of the sweet winter wine with a roll of her eyes before greeting her supporters warmly. They all offer her congratulations with a healthy dose of vindicated glee; the roaring success of today reflects well on all of them, and they are all acutely aware of that. Well, perhaps Bran isn’t, but he doesn’t seem too bothered by the politics of everything. For all that his words were a joke, he really is simply a representative of the people, and he would never go the slightest against his own morals for the sake of something political.

Conversations flows easily as alcohol does, and the throne room fills with anyone of any real importance. They are a few councillors who might decline to attend this portion of the festivities, the ones who don’t play with allys and favours, but for the most part they all trickle in as time passes. As people in Otta receive their participation stipends and likely have their first decent meal in a while, the court and council of Azgeda drinks mead and ice wine and snacks on delicacies. 

“Ah, we should have a toast!” Bran exclaims in the middle of a conversation about tree husbandry - a topic which Clarke knows hardly anything about, but she was quite enjoying the passion of the woman explaining it to her. The group around her agrees with cheers, and before Clarke can protest, Bran grabs her elbow and turns her to face the majority of the room.

“To Wanheda’s greatest victory yet!” Bran raises his glass with a bellow, and Clarke smiles with her own glass raised, inclining it to everyone gathered in front of her.

“To the warriors who fought alongside me,” she adds, and Bran chortles. 

“Well said!” He gently knocks the rim of his glass to Clarke’s, and a soft echoing ring runs through the gathering as others follow suit. “We drink!”

Bran knocks back his drink and Clarke takes a sip of hers. The entire room drinks to the toast, and then everyone’s attention drifts back to their own agendas. It is a celebration, but there’s never an incorrect time to be playing political games for most of the people here. Some drift off to talk in small groups and some leave for their own evening plans, although a surprising amount simply engage in the festivities. Bran joins the last, drinking and playing some game involving stabbing a knife between your fingers with increasing speed.

Clarke looks around at the gathering, at the people she’s come to know quite well, and even though she doesn’t like them all and wouldn’t dare to consider this ‘safe’, she feels oddly comfortable. Not calm and protected, but the sort of comfort that comes with doing a job you know you’re good at, a quiet and confident feeling of success. 

A few people come up to her to offer congratulations, and she accepts it graciously, marking the people in her mind. Some of them had been firmly against her before, yet seem to be entirely on her side in the wake of her success. It’s good to know who those ones are, and Clarke makes a list as she shakes the hand of an advisor who had called her “brainless” not four days ago.

“You know I always supported you, yes?” The slimy man smiles, a look entirely discomforting on his features. Clarke smiles as if she had completely forgotten all his insults.

“Why yes, of c-”

Clarke is cut off by the sound of the large doors opening, and everyone in the room turns to face them. A latecomer to the party would have used one of the side entrances, not the massive double doors, and they certainly wouldn’t be escorted in by a cadre of guards. Clarke notes many of the Azgeda soldiers as ones who patrol the perimeter of the castle, looking for unwanted guests and escorting in diplomats.

The processions halts in front of her, and the lead guard clasps her fist over her heart, bowing her head. She looks up, and Clarke nods in deep confusion to indicate that she should speak. Clarke hears someone moving next to her and glances over to see Bran, taking a solid position with his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“Wanheda, they requested an audience with you.” The guard explains shortly, and Clarke’s brow furrows.

“Who did?” She asks. The guard steps to the side, and the barrier of warriors separates, allowing her to see who ‘they’ are.

“Bellamy? Octavia?” Part of Clarke wants to run to her friends and hug them, but she is acutely aware of the entirety of the court watching her, gauging her reaction to the arrival of members of Skaikru. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh…” Bellamy awkwardly makes a noncommittal noise, looking around at all the gathered Azgeda nobles, Clarke standing in their midst as if she belongs there. Which, she realizes as she takes in the discrepancies between her clothing and that of Bellamy and Octavia, she does.

“We’re here to rescue you.” Octavia scoffs, turning a dry sarcastic look on Bellamy, “Isn’t it obvious?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hahahahahahaha heyyyyyyyyyyy it's an update. Anyway, the last line of this chapter is my favourite line in all of Hypothermia. Oh, and, uh, how about Roan being an absolute idiot, huh? Good timing bud.
> 
> Feel free to yell at me [on tumblr](http://jonnmurphy.tumblr.com), and don't worry, my lovely beta Etra is with you guys yelling at me about the slow burn :p


	8. [INTERLUDE] 7.5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A brief view of Roan's POV, immediately following the kiss

Roan was born and raised to be a king. No, not just a king, the King. The leader of Azgeda, just as noble and proud as his people. He fought for this, it’s all he’s ever wanted, and as he rides out of Otta in the pre-dawn darkness, he holds himself tall. People salute him as he and his entourage pass; warriors, one and all. He does not look down at them from his horse, keeps his eyes level and forward. This is how he shows his love for them, by being the strong pillar they can and do rely on.

It also happens, on this day, to provide Roan with the perfect cover. Being tall and strong and, most importantly, silent means that he can quietly and internally panic. Because he may just very well have ruined everything, forever. Roan takes a deep breath as he resists the urge to hide his face in his hands as he thinks, or perhaps more accurately, obsesses about his actions that morning.

All he had wanted to do was let Clarke know he was leaving. That was innocent enough, right? She’s an incredible asset, a powerful ally, and she needed to know because of logistics. With him gone, she’s in charge. So waking her up, well, that wasn’t an issue. The way he’d stood next to her and hesitated, hand hovering in no-man’s land between him and her, that had been… something.

Roan’s not a fool, of course, and he doesn’t do denial. He knows damn well that he’s had feelings for Clarke since before he brought her to his lands, and that they’ve only got stronger since then. Wanting to kiss her after battles, spending time around her just to hear her sass him, that was normal enough. That was the pattern. And he would have never, ever acted on any of that, of course. The implications are far too expansive to even bear thinking, and besides that, Clarke doesn’t feel the same way. Just getting her to not hate him was an incredible victory, and he was never going to push that.

But then his feelings had shifted in a way that he most definitely did not want. Because attraction is simple, and Roan’s fine with ignoring that. But the small smiles Clarke would give him sometimes began to be more valuable to him, her victories would fill him with such a sense of pride, and sometimes just thinking of her would make his chest feel lighter. Attraction rapidly had shifted into something more tender on his part, and that was dangerous. His lands, and he himself, are not built for tenderness. 

More than that, Clarke clearly doesn’t feel the same way about him. 

Roan’s horse follows a path cut into snow, walls of blue and white on either side of him towering above. He glances up to the top of the ridges and somewhat hopes for an assassination attempt. A fight would take his mind off of it all. With no attackers evident, Roan sighs and has to acknowledge the truth. 

Clarke’s feelings, although more favourable than when she’d first been brought here, are not the same as Roan’s, and he respects that. Or, at least, he had thought he respected that. He had told himself, day after day, that just being near her was enough for him, and that it would be impossibly rude to force his feelings on her. She’s a political ally, goddamnit, and he’s the King. Plus, this all started with her as his prisoner. It wouldn’t be right, wouldn’t be fair to her, and Roan has found himself growing increasingly concerned with what is fair to Clarke.

But of course, this morning he’d thrown all that out the window. He could blame it on confusion, sleep deprivation, but he knows it’s nothing of the sort. Roan had knelt next to Clarke, and she’d looked so beautiful, and when they’d talked she had smiled at him and it had taken his breath away. Even now, in the freezing cold, barren lands he rules over, the thought of her smile makes his heart skip a beat, and heat flood his cheeks. Thankfully, Roan rides at the head of his men, and as such doesn’t have to worry about any of them seeing him blushing like some barely scarred youngling with a crush.

He’d thought he had it under control. Roan had been so sure he could care for Clarke and simply stand by her side, never touching, never crossing that line. But in that moment he’d remembered counselling her after her nightmare, holding her in the blizzard, watching her school the council, kissing her forehead and holding her hand when she was dying before his eyes- No, he definitely did not have it under control. Roan’s control had broken, and-

Roan clenches his jaw and shuts his eyes for a moment, feeling like a royal idiot. His stomach twists uncomfortably at the memory of kissing her, because even with everything else, that little moment, that heartbeat is what they can never go back from. He wishes he could take it back- but no, of course he doesn’t. Because her lips are so soft, and though it was a small kiss, it could have been the end of him. Just to be that close to her, to feel her lips with his, Roan had almost thrown everything out the window, told her everything.

But he’d pulled himself back at the last second, because she hadn’t reciprocated. She hadn’t slapped him, which is promising, but she hadn’t kissed him back. And maybe she was just surprised, but Roan knows with a pang in his heart that’s not what happened. She knows he’s the king, so of course she wouldn’t feel safe rejecting him. That must be it, to Roan, the only reasonable explanation for why she hadn’t rebuffed him immediately.

So, he had ruined it all. The certainty sinks in with every hollow thud of hooves, and Roan breathes deep. Why couldn’t he have just left? He could have had so many more moments with her, with Clarke asking about his scars, designing one for herself, and maybe one day-

No, Roan shuts that idea down. He never lets himself indulge in those daydreams, those crazy fantasies. He’s a king, and she’s his political prisoner, his advisor at best. “One day” is not a thing he should be thinking of, in regards to her. The only thing he should think of that way is his people, and a knife drives into his heart as he sees how this could hurt them too.

What if Clarke wants to leave? Of course, he would let her, with his blessing. It’s not her fault he’s a fool who can’t control himself. But his people would suffer for it. Without her, they would have been decimated by famine this winter. In the future, who’s to say how many lives she could save, what great tasks she could accomplish. Without her, Roan’s afraid he might even lose his way, forget his people and his duty and fall into the path his mother had taken. There are certainly more than enough on the council who would be more than happy to nudge him in that direction.

“My King?” A voice calls Roan from his increasingly dark reverie, and he turns his head ever so slightly to indicate he heard. “We should feed the horses?”

The warrior’s voice is uncertain, as if afraid of what Roan might do to him. Roan, of course, does nothing to warrant this, nodding and stopping his horse and thus the entire party. He dismounts and sees to his mount’s wellbeing while his warriors pull out feed and thaw snow, warming it slightly for the beasts to drink. 

Of course none of the people with him would feel confident calling him to a stop. Roan looks around and sees only the youngest of his Kingsguard; all valiant warriors, but also all incredibly awe-struck by their ruler. It had been a fight with Arlen to create such an arrangement, but Roan wasn’t going to leave Clarke underprotected. Sure, she’s a good fighter these days, but still. Even before the kiss, Roan had a lot to make up for, and ensuring she didn’t have to use her sword by leaving his most valuable guards behind was a small measure. 

Roan doesn’t help with the short rest. It wouldn’t do for the king to be seen doing such menial tasks on official business. He desperately wants to, of course, because the labour might distract him, but instead he simply stands in the path and looks imperious. And worries.

Not for himself, of course. There’s a better than average chance that he will be attacked on this trip, but that doesn’t concern him. He’s worried about how Clarke will be received on the dawning of the tournament, if people will decide to take issue with it in a violent manner. Hell, some of his councillors had attacked her already, and without him there, they might think they have free reign to do so again. Of course, it did seem she was winning them over quite handily on her own, but Roan is still nervous.

Even if she hates him - which, of course she does, he had kissed her against her will, why wouldn’t she hate him - that doesn’t mean he wants her to be any less successful or safe. He hopes beyond hope that the tournament will be a resounding success and all will be well, but he fears otherwise. 

Roan had never worried this much, even in his years of exile. It had always been easy, just survive whatever tried to kill him and move onto the next thing. But now, with someone else to care about, he’s finding he’s quite good at worrying. Especially as they mount up and ride out, putting time and distance between himself and the object of his concern. 

He wishes Clarke were here, or that he were back there with her. Not even just so that he could explain himself - which he really wishes he could, he honestly should have done before running away. No, out of everyone, Clarke understands him best, he feels. If she were here, well, maybe he wouldn’t confide in her, but he could at least draw comfort from her presence and the knowledge of everything they’ve been through together. He gets to be human in front of her: not King, but simply Roan.

And he might have lost that forever. Roan’s thoughts loop around again, but this time, he knows what he has to do. He has to apologize and grovel and lie, if that’s what it takes, anything to get Clarke to forgive him. He will never cross that line again, he swears, and he will do anything it takes to keep Clarke in Azgeda lands, even if that means she wants him to leave her alone. It’s so important to his people that she remain, and even being able to see her in council will be enough for him.

Roan resolves himself of this path and begins thinking up apologies, from mundane to grand gestures, when his horse shies suddenly. His mind immediately snaps to the present, and his sword is in his hand before the first of the black clad figures drops to the path in front of him with a resounding thud. The downsides of the main road, with their cavern-cut walls of snow; if you’re willing to risk falling into the snow, it’s quite easy to creep across the drifts and set up an ambush.

“Rumour is the King’s gone soft,” the figure in front of him chuckles, and more drop down to join them. He hears impacts behind as well, to cut off their only retreat.

As if he would run.

“See for yourself,” Roan taunts through bared teeth, levelling his sword at the lead attacker.

As the ambusher leaps at him, Roan almost laughs. He had been hoping for a fight, hadn’t he?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> okay, it's just a little something to tide you guys over, but a lot of people have been asking for something from Roan's POV, so here it is! i promise, i'm still working on the next chapter, and it's a good one.
> 
> Ets deserves all the props for editing this one, my grasp on tenses was a fucking disaster, there were something like 58 points where it needed to be fixed. an utter angel, that one.


End file.
